Portrait of the Artist with the Idol

In August 1893 Gauguin landed back in France after two years in Tahiti, with almost no money, and that November he put on a show of 44 paintings at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris. Eleven of them sold. Much of the press treated the Tahitian titles as a joke. He is wearing a striped shirt and a spotted tie here, clothes for a cold city season, which is one reason the picture is placed at the end of that first voyage rather than during it. Over his shoulder stands Hina, the Tahitian moon goddess, a figure he carved and painted again and again in those years. A small inheritance from an uncle in Orleans reached him at about the same time, and most of it was gone before he sailed for the Pacific a second time in 1895.