Piti Teina

Gauguin painted this in 1892, during his first stay in Tahiti, where he had gone looking for a simpler life than the one he left behind in France. Two young women stand close together, which gives the picture its Tahitian title, Piti Teina, meaning two sisters. The painting then had a strange history of its own. It ended up with a German industrialist, Otto Krebs, and when Soviet forces reached Germany in 1945 it was among the artworks taken to the Soviet Union at the end of the war. For nearly 50 years it was kept out of sight in the Hermitage, its whereabouts unknown to the outside world, until the museum finally showed these hidden works to the public in 1995.