Woman at the beach

In 1876 the Paris critic Edmond Duranty set painters a problem. A figure seen from behind, he argued, should still tell you the person's age, standing and state of mind. Edgar Degas took it up in his pastels of women washing, and around 1888 Gauguin copied some of them into one of his albums. Four years later, in the village of Mataiea on Tahiti, he entered this canvas in his notebook as a study of a nude back, working from a colour drawing in the same book. When it was shown in Paris in 1893, the critic Thadée Natanson noted that you see only her tanned back, amid the almost symmetrical flowers that sea foam embroiders on the waves. Gauguin had first turned wave crests into flowers in Brittany, a device he took from the Japanese prints of Hiroshige. The Tahitian title is painted on the large leaf at the bottom and means woman of the sea.