Te Fare

Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891, broke and sick of Europe, hoping to find something simpler to paint. Te Fare, meaning the house, comes from that first stay, when he was living in a bamboo hut in the village of Mataiea on the island's south coast. Instead of a grand subject he took an ordinary Tahitian house and the figures near it and flattened the whole scene into bands of hot colour, pink earth, green, deep blue. The island he actually found was already reshaped by French colonial rule, not the untouched paradise he had imagined. He painted his own version of it anyway.