Fatata te Moua (Au pied de la montagne)

Gauguin had landed in Tahiti in 1891, chasing a paradise he mostly failed to find, and by 1892 he was ill and short of money, sending pictures like this back to Paris. He painted the island in broad flat zones of strong colour, the way a memory simplifies a place. A single large tree anchors the foot of the mountain in the distance. That mountain kept reappearing in his Tahitian work, tied in his mind to Hina, the local goddess of the moon. The Russian collector Ivan Morozov later bought the canvas, and after his collection was nationalised it passed to the Hermitage in 1948.