Arearea no varua ino

Gauguin gave this a Tahitian title, Arearea no varua ino, which gets translated as words of the Devil, or the amusement of the evil spirit. The surprise is that he painted it in France in 1894, not in the tropics. He had come back from his first stay in Tahiti the year before, held a large exhibition of that work in Paris, and watched it mostly fail to sell. So he reworked his island memories from sketches and imagination in a Paris studio, two Tahitian women reclining on a beach in white blouses and blue wraps, the colours hotter and flatter than any French landscape. Within a year he would give up on Europe and sail back to the Pacific for good.