Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen)

Gauguin painted this snowy Breton village while living on the other side of the world, in the South Seas, in the last months of his life. The steeple and low cottages come from Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he had worked years earlier, but the memory is stitched together from everywhere he had been. The women wear the dark headdresses of the coastal village of Le Pouldu. The two oxen are borrowed from Egyptian art, and the small nativity figures echo a Javanese temple frieze he knew from photographs. He never saw it exhibited in Europe. The canvas was found in his South Seas studio after he died in 1903.