Tahitian Woman with a Flower

Gauguin reached Tahiti in the summer of 1891, having left France partly to escape a world he found overcivilised, and this was among the first pictures he painted there. It is a plain, close portrait of a local woman in a high-necked European missionary dress, holding a single white flower, set against flat bands of colour. He sent it back to Paris that year and told his dealer he thought it the best thing he had done. The dress is worth noticing. The so-called untouched paradise Gauguin had come looking for was already decades into French colonial and missionary rule, and its mark is right there on her clothing.