Annah the Javanese, or The Child-woman Judith Is Not Yet Breached

Gauguin painted this in Paris in 1893 or 1894, back from his first stay in Tahiti and struggling to sell the strange bright canvases he had brought home. The girl was about 13, sent to him as a servant and model. She was not Javanese and had never seen the tropics, but Gauguin dressed the picture in his invented exoticism, seating her in a blue chair and lettering a Tahitian phrase across the top. The words describe not so much her as his own myth of himself, a man who claimed to live beyond European rules. She stayed with him a while, then left, taking what she could carry from his flat. Little else about her is recorded with any certainty.