Aha Oe Feii?

Two Tahitian women rest on a beach after bathing, one lying back, one sitting with a wary look, and the strange word in the corner is what the second one said. Gauguin wrote down the scene in his Tahitian notebook. The sisters had been talking idly about past and future lovers when the talk soured into a quarrel, and one snapped the phrase he inscribed at lower left, aha oe feii, roughly are you jealous. He painted it in 1892, during his first stay in Tahiti, when he was deliberately learning the language and building his pictures from flat zones of hot pink sand and deep color rather than European modeling. He had left France partly to escape it, chasing what he imagined was a simpler life. The canvas has hung in Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum, since 1948.