Warum bist du böse? (No Te Aha Oe Riri)

Gauguin went back to Tahiti in 1895 hoping for somewhere cheaper and further from Europe than the island he had left, and found the port town more colonial than before. He settled up the coast at Punaauia in a hut he put up himself, in poor health and short of money, and for big pictures like this one he stretched coarse jute sacking instead of proper canvas. The weave of it shows through the paint. He lettered the title onto the picture in Tahitian, a language he handled clumsily, so the question sits there with nobody attached to it and no quarrel visible among the women in the scene. The canvas went to Paris in 1897, in a shipment he sent his dealer while trying to raise enough money to stay.