Barbarian Poems

By 1896 Gauguin had returned to Tahiti a second time, ill and short of money. What he painted here is a religion of his own making. The seated winged woman draws on Christian angels and on Buddhist figures he knew from photographs, while the dark animal beside her stands in for a Tahitian idol. He kept the forms flat and ringed them in heavy dark outlines, a manner he had carried from his years in Brittany, and he pitched the whole thing in warm reds and deep shadow. The canvas itself tells the harder story. Short of materials, he painted over a picture he had already made, and conservators at Harvard, scanning beneath the surface, have found the earlier scene he buried here, a landscape with riders on horseback.