Parau na te Varua ino (Palabras del diablo)

Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891, expecting an untouched paradise and finding an island already run by French officials and missionaries. He painted this the next year and gave it a Tahitian title rather than a French one. A young woman covers herself with a cloth, in the pose Western art had long kept for Eve after the fall, while a dark hooded figure watches from behind the tree, a spirit of the dead of the kind Gauguin said still troubled the islanders he lived among. He blended what he found there with the Bible stories of his own childhood. He carried the canvas back to Paris in 1893 and showed it there, part of his effort to sell France a Tahiti of his own making.