The Bunch of Flowers

Gauguin painted this in 1891, in his first months on Tahiti, where he had sailed hoping to leave Europe and its markets behind. It looks at first like an ordinary bouquet, but he gave it a Tahitian title, Te tiare farani, meaning the flowers of France, and lettered the words onto the tabletop. Behind the vase he tucked a scrap of map showing the coast of South America, and set two Tahitian figures at the edges of the room. Four years later, back in Paris and short of money, he put the canvas into an auction at the Hôtel Drouot to help pay for a second voyage out to the islands.