Matamoe (la Mort), paysage aux paons

By 1892 Gauguin had left the colonial town of Papeete and moved to Mataiea, a village on Tahiti's south coast, chasing a Tahiti he felt Europe had already spoiled. Soon after arriving he described watching a young man swing an axe overhead to fell a diseased coconut palm, and that figure stands at the centre here, mid-swing over a fallen trunk. Behind him a hut, a small fire, and two peacocks stepping through the clearing, though peacocks are not native to the island and belong more to Gauguin's imagined paradise than to what he actually saw. He brushed the Tahitian word Matamoe onto it, a term argued over ever since, read as death by some and as sleep or the old days by others.