風景、道の上の馬

Gauguin painted this in Tahiti in 1899, in the last stretch of a life spent chasing what he imagined was a simpler world at the far edge of the French empire. A horse stands on a pink dirt road, Tahitians and huts beyond, the whole scene flattened into broad bands of warm colour. The canvas travelled with him when he moved on to the even more remote Marquesas Islands. From there, in 1903, he shipped it with nine other paintings to his dealer Vollard in Paris, the last works he sent to France before he died that same year. In Paris the Moscow textile magnate Sergei Shchukin bought it, and after the Revolution his collection was nationalised, which is how a Tahitian road came to hang in a Moscow museum.