Bathers at Tahiti

Gauguin painted this on sacking. He was living at Punaauia on the west coast of Tahiti in 1897, out of money and in and out of hospital, and artist's canvas had to come by ship from France, so he stretched coarse jute instead and the weave shows through the paint. In January that year his daughter Aline died of pneumonia in Copenhagen at 19, and the news took months to reach him. At the end of 1897 he painted the four-metre canvas he called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, and this is one of eight smaller pictures tied to it. When they were shown together in Paris in 1898 they were presented as fragmentary replicas of the big painting and studies for it. The Barber Institute in Birmingham bought it in 1949, from the collection of a Czech-born conductor who had bought it from Samuel Courtauld.