聖なる泉、甘美な夢（ナヴェ・ナヴェ・モエ）

Gauguin painted this in Paris at the start of 1894, not in the tropics. He had come back from Tahiti two years earlier, out of money, and was living in a studio hung with his own island pictures, still working the memory. So the scene is remembered rather than seen. Two Tahitian women sit by a pool, one asleep with a faint halo over her head, the other holding fruit like an Eve about to bite. Gauguin folded Christian signs into a Polynesian world that never used them, the halo and the lily standing for purity. He even lettered the Tahitian words Nave nave moe onto the canvas, which he glossed as a sweet, drowsy delight. The Moscow collector Ivan Morozov bought it in 1907, and it reached the Hermitage in 1931.