Three Tahitian Women Against a Yellow Background

Gauguin painted this in 1899 in Punaauia, on the west coast of Tahiti, during his second and final stay in the Pacific. These were hard years. He was in debt, often ill, and scraping by on money sent from Paris, yet the picture gives none of that away. Three women stand close together against a plain yellow ground that flattens the whole scene, so they read almost like a carved frieze. One offers a dish of blossoms, another holds fruit, their dark hair and deep-toned robes set hard against the gold behind them. Gauguin had given up trying to record what Tahiti looked like. He wanted colour arranged for its own sake, and the flat yellow field here does the work that sky or landscape would in an ordinary painting.