The Woodcutter

In the summer of 1891 Paul Gauguin stepped off a ship at Papeete, on Tahiti, chasing a simplicity he felt Paris could no longer give him. This is among the first paintings he made there, worked up from a scene he watched right outside his hut: a man swinging an axe at a dead tree while a woman sorted fishing nets behind him. Gauguin called the young man Jotefa, though the name may be his own invention. He let the colours run far past anything he would have used at home, saying he was only matching the natural hues around him. The bare back and the raised axe carry most of the picture's charge.