The Mango Trees, Martinique

Gauguin was on Martinique for about four months in 1887, and this is the most ambitious thing he brought back from the island. It was not painted in front of the scene. He worked from drawings made on the spot, squared them up, and assembled the figures into a mango harvest that never happened all at once: women picking, gathering, carrying, one of them eating. The three central figures are porteuses, the women who carried produce along the roads for a living, and the largest of them has her back to us. The short parallel brushstrokes come from Cezanne, whose work Gauguin had collected in his stockbroking years. When he got back to Paris that November he sold the canvas to the art dealer Theo van Gogh for 400 francs, which made it one of the most expensive pictures Theo ever bought for himself.