The King's Wife

Gauguin painted this in 1896, back in Tahiti for a second stay, poor, ill, and deliberately far from Paris. He gave it a Tahitian title, Te Arii Vahine, and in a letter home that April he called her "a naked queen." The pose, though, is pure European art history. Gauguin had carried a photograph of Manet's Olympia with him across the world, and he lays his model down in the same frank, propped-up pose that had scandalized Paris some 30 years before. Around her he scatters ripe mangoes and sets a round fan behind her head, and in the lower corner he writes the Tahitian words straight onto the canvas.