Contes barbares

By 1902 Gauguin was living out his last year in the Marquesas Islands, far out in the Pacific, ill and deep in debt, less than twelve months from death. Here he painted two young Marquesan women seated among flowers, close and calm. Crouched behind them is a red-haired European with an oddly clawed foot: Meijer de Haan, a Dutch painter he had befriended back in Brittany, and who had already been dead for seven years when this canvas was made. Gauguin kept returning to de Haan's face in his final works, long after the man was gone. The single white lily rising beside the women was for him a familiar sign of purity and of death.