Landscape

In September 1901 Gauguin left Tahiti for Hiva Oa, one of the Marquesas Islands far to the north-east. The Musée de l'Orangerie thinks this canvas probably shows that island, which would place it in his first months there. The museum lists it as attributed to Gauguin, a cautious label, and its record does not say who doubts the picture or why, even though the lower right corner is signed and dated P. Gauguin 1901.

Almost the whole canvas is vegetation, with the sky pressed into a thin band along the top. In the middle of a yellow-green meadow a small dark figure in a long black robe walks ahead of three children, and the museum reads him as a missionary priest. The painting was once called The Priest and the Children. The museum points to the stacked, tiered planes and the long hatched strokes in the greens as typical of Gauguin's landscapes from his last years.