Pastorales tahitiennes

Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891 looking for an untouched paradise and found instead a colony already half-remade by France and its missionaries. He painted the island he wanted anyway. This is from 1892, his first year there, two Tahitian women in a clearing towards evening, one of them playing a flute, the scene built from flat zones of pure orange and green laid down like a decorated surface rather than a view. He tied the flute to old belief, music played at dusk to the goddess of the moon as the light goes. A Moscow collector, Ivan Morozov, bought it early, which is how a Tahitian evening now hangs in Saint Petersburg.