Source mystérieuse

By 1893 Gauguin had spent two years in Tahiti, and this is one of the pictures he carried back to Paris that autumn to show what he had found. It looks like a moment glimpsed in a forest, a slender figure bending to drink from a waterfall, the rocks around it glowing violet and green. In truth he did not paint it from life. He worked from a photograph taken on the island by Charles Georges Spitz, then reshaped the pose and drenched it in colours no camera saw. The title he gave it, Pape moe, means mysterious water. The plant at the lower right, heavy with red blossom, is the kind of local detail he gathered in Tahiti and carried home in his sketchbooks.