Quand te maries-tu ?

Gauguin painted this in 1892, during his first stay in Tahiti, where he had gone hoping to find a life untouched by the Europe he was fed up with. What he actually found was a colonial French outpost, and much of his Tahiti is a picture he built rather than one he stepped into. Two young women sit in the foreground in strong flat colour, one in a traditional wrap, one in the high-necked dress the missionaries had brought. The Tahitian title asks when will you marry, and it hangs over them without an answer. Gauguin was often broke and sent canvases like this back to Paris hoping to sell them. This one carried an afterlife he never saw. In 2015 it changed hands privately for a reported 210 million dollars, among the highest prices ever paid for a painting.