La Fin royale

Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891 expecting an untouched paradise and found a French colony, its old world already fading. Within weeks the island's last king, Pomare V, died, and Gauguin watched the public mourning. This picture grew out of that, though he freely admitted he invented most of it. He wrote to a friend that he had just finished a severed head, nicely arranged on a white cushion, in a palace of his own invention, guarded by women also of his invention. No Tahitian funeral looked like this. The two words painted top left, arii and matamoe, mean roughly royal and sleeping eyes, his phrase for a death. A Getty curator has guessed he built the whole grisly scene mainly to startle Paris when he brought it home.