タペラア・マハナ

Gauguin reached Tahiti in the middle of 1891, having told friends in Paris that he wanted to escape everything artificial and paint a simpler world. What he actually found was a French colony run from Paris for decades, its port full of the officials and missionaries he had hoped to leave behind. He painted this the following year and kept the title in the Tahitian he was still learning, Taperaa Mahana, late afternoon. He sold almost nothing on this first trip and sailed home broke in 1893. The canvas took a stranger path than its maker. Bought later by one of the great Moscow collectors of new French painting, it was nationalised after the 1917 revolution, which is how an afternoon in the tropics came to hang in Saint Petersburg.