Hiva Oa

Gauguin painted this in the last months of his life, on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, the remote island where he had settled in 1901 after Tahiti no longer felt far enough from Europe. By 1903 he was ill, in debt, and at war with the local French authorities and the Catholic mission. Yet the landscape he painted here is calm and almost timeless, a horse and a pig at rest among the hills, with none of the tourism or colonial officialdom that filled his letters. He died on Hiva Oa in May of that year. This canvas, one of his very last, reached Finland in 1908 and has hung in Helsinki ever since.