Ia Orana Maria

Gauguin painted this in his first year in Tahiti, in 1891, soon after he arrived looking for a life stripped of Europe. The title is Tahitian for the words the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, Hail Mary, and that is what the scene is, an Annunciation moved to the tropics. The mother and child carried on a shoulder wear golden halos, two women stand in worship, and an angel half hides among the trees. The frieze of poses did not come from Tahiti at all. Gauguin worked them up from a photograph he owned of a stone relief at Borobudur, the great Buddhist temple in Java. Of everything he made on that first trip, this is the only picture where he brought Christian belief directly into the island world.