ウ・ハエレ・イア・オエ

The title is an everyday Tahitian greeting, the kind of thing you call out when someone passes: where are you going? Gauguin painted it in 1893, at the very end of his first stay on the island, nearly out of money and preparing to sail back to France. A young woman stands in the foreground holding a green fruit against her hip, and he thought of her as a sort of island Eve. Behind her the flat bands of pink earth and hot color owe little to how the light in Tahiti actually looked. He was after a paradise built from memory and imagination rather than reported fact. Back in Paris the picture sold poorly, and it eventually reached a Russian collector, which is how it hangs in Saint Petersburg today.