Le sorcier d'Hiva-Oa

By 1902 Gauguin had run about as far from Europe as he could go. He was living on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, in a stilt house he called the Maison du Jouir, sick, in debt, and quarrelling constantly with the island's gendarme and its Catholic bishop. The young man in the red cape here is thought to be Haapuani, a dancer Gauguin knew who also had a reputation as a taua, an old-style Marquesan priest and sorcerer. Gauguin gives him long hair and a soft, almost androgynous face, the kind of figure that drew European viewers and unsettled them at once. In the lower corner sit a fox and a bird, animals he loaded with private meaning elsewhere. He finished it within months of his death in May 1903. The canvas hangs today in Liege.