Nave Nave Mahana

Gauguin painted this in 1896, back in Tahiti for the second time, poor and ill and increasingly at odds with the colonial world he had come looking for. The Tahitian title means something close to delightful days. He lines up young women gathering fruit in a shallow band across the canvas, feet planted on red earth under a yellow sky, still and monumental as figures on an ancient frieze, the timeless island he wanted to believe in rather than the one he lived in. In 1913, ten years after his death, the museum in Lyon bought it, the first painting by Gauguin to enter a French public collection.