Sœur de charité

Gauguin had been living in Atuona, on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, since September 1901. The Catholic mission ran the schools there and children were required to attend into their teens, and he spent his last years quarrelling with the bishop and urging Marquesan parents to keep their daughters at home. The nun here was not worked up from a sitter. Her head comes from a drawing he had made on his first Tahitian trip in 1891, and her body from a photograph of a French sister that he found in a book. Around her he set Marquesan figures, two women dressed as missionaries would have wanted them dressed, one woman bare-breasted and plaiting a chain of flowers, and two men in native dress, one of them apparently speaking to her. He painted it in 1902 and died the following year, at 54.