Villaggio in Martinica (Femmes et Chevre dans le village)

Gauguin reached Martinique in June 1887 by an unplanned route. He and the painter Charles Laval had sailed for Panama expecting easy money, and Gauguin ended up swinging a pick on the French canal works, which were then sliding towards the bankruptcy that destroyed the company two years later. Dismissed after about two weeks, sick and broke, the two men took a boat to Martinique and rented a hut outside Saint-Pierre. He stayed until October. This village scene, with the goat under the tree and the woman sitting to hold her foot, is one of roughly a dozen canvases he brought home, and the same figures turn up again in the prints he made in 1889. Saint-Pierre itself was gone within 15 years, buried when Mont Pelee erupted in 1902.