La donna imbronciata (Te Faaturuma)

Gauguin reached Tahiti in June 1891, having sold work in Paris to fund the passage and told friends he was leaving European civilisation behind for something simpler. What he found around the capital, Papeete, was a colonial town already shaped by French rule and missionaries. This is among the first canvases he painted there. A young Tahitian woman sits on the floor, chin resting on her hand, wrapped in her own thoughts, and behind her he lays a hot wall of pink and orange that owes nothing to how the room actually looked. That flattened, unreal colour is the thing he had crossed an ocean to try. The Tahitian title, Te Faaturuma, was for years mistranslated in America as the sulking woman.