Women and a White Horse

Gauguin had lived on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, since 1901, and this is thought to be one of the last pictures he painted there. Three local women and a white horse are lined up across the foreground like figures on a frieze, with tropical plants pouring down around them. Higher up, on the hill, stands a small white cross. Gauguin seldom let any sign of the French missions into his island pictures, and in these years he was writing furiously against the colonial officials and the Catholic Church. Still, the cross is there, and it marks the Catholic cemetery above Atuona, the village where he lived. He died on 8 May 1903 and was buried in that cemetery at two o'clock the following afternoon. By 1906 the canvas had travelled to Vienna, where the painter Carl Moll, who ran a gallery there, wrote that he had just bought a Gauguin landscape from 1903, almost certainly this one.