La Lune et la Terre

When Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891, he expected an untouched paradise and found a French colony instead, with officials, a cathedral, and imported clothes. So he painted the island he had hoped for rather than the one around him. Here he stages an old Polynesian myth. Hina, the spirit of the moon, stands nude and asks Fatou, the towering spirit of the earth, to let people live forever. His stone-grey face has already refused her. Gauguin worked the paint into coarse burlap, which drinks the color and flattens everything into bands. He made this in 1893, the year he sailed back to Paris nearly broke, carrying canvases almost nobody there wanted.