Women at the Riverside

Gauguin reached Tahiti in June 1891 hoping to live cheaply and paint far from the art trade, and by 1892, the year of this small canvas, the plan was going badly. He was short of money, often ill, and already writing letters about a passage home. What he painted was not the island of the travel brochures he had read in Paris but ordinary work at the water: women at a riverbank doing the washing. The laundry spread out in the stream is the part he pushed hardest. The museum notes how he gave it hard clean edges until it reads as flat planes of colour lying in the water. He stayed two more years before that passage back to France came through.