Portrait de Suzanne Bambridge

Gauguin came ashore at Papeete on 9 June 1891. Three days later Pomare V, the last king of Tahiti, died, and Gauguin watched the funeral of a monarchy that France had already reduced to a pension and a title. One of his first canvases on the island was this commissioned portrait of Suzanne Bambridge, then 47, daughter of an English settler and a Tahitian mother, and one of the best-connected women in the town, at home both with the colonial administration and with what was left of the Pomare court. He painted it in the capital he had crossed the world to get away from, and by September he had moved to a village on the south coast. A technical study in Brussels found that he went back into the canvas with fresh paint some time after finishing it.