The Seed of the Areoi

Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 expecting an untouched paradise and found a French colony instead, its old religion mostly gone and the Areoi — a Polynesian society of travelling performers — long since disappeared. So he rebuilt the lost world from books and imagination. Here his young Tahitian companion, Teha'amana, sits as Vairaumati, the woman a sun god chose in the Areoi creation myth to found a new race, holding a flowering seed for fertility. He flattened her into bands of unshadowed colour borrowed from Japanese prints and from a Javanese temple relief he knew only through photographs he carried. And he painted it all on coarse burlap sacking rather than canvas, partly because that was what he could afford.