オウムのある静物

Gauguin painted this in 1902 on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, the remote Pacific island where he spent his last months, sick, deep in debt, and quarrelling constantly with the French colonial officials and priests who ran the place. It was among the final years of his life; he died there in the spring of 1903. The picture rewards a second look. The two parrots, bright orange and green, are not perched but dead, laid on a cloth beside a small carved idol Gauguin made himself. Within a few years the canvas had travelled almost as far from the Marquesas as it could, bought by the Moscow textile magnate Ivan Morozov, which is how it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum.