Le Grand Bouddha

Gauguin painted this in Tahiti near the end of the 1890s, during his second and final stay in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the Paris art world he had left for good. He was poor, often ill, and increasingly drawn to folding the religions of the world into a single image. A large seated Buddha looms in shadow at the back. In front, dim figures act out something close to a Christian Last Supper, while carved Polynesian motifs press in at the edges. Gauguin wasn't documenting any one faith. He was inventing his own, mixing Asia, Europe and the islands into one dark devotional scene. The signature is so faint that scholars still argue whether he finished it in 1896, 1898 or 1899.