The White Horse

Gauguin painted this during his second stay in Tahiti, in 1898, a bleak stretch when he was sick, broke, and had recently tried to take his own life. The scene is invented rather than observed, a horse bending to drink in a stream, its white coat washed green by the reflected forest, other riders melting into the trees behind. A local pharmacist had commissioned the picture, then refused to pay for it, complaining that the horse was the wrong colour, far too green. In Tahitian belief white was tied to death and the passage of the soul, which may be why Gauguin set this pale, solitary animal so deliberately apart.