Fatata te Miti

Gauguin painted this in 1892, in the first months of the trip to Tahiti he had staked everything on, leaving France to find a paradise untouched by the modern world. The scene is simple enough. One woman slips off her wrap to follow another already wading into the surf, while a man spears fish just beyond them, all of it laid down in flat, unmixed colour with dark outlines, a method he had worked out years earlier in Brittany. The trouble is that the untouched paradise was mostly in his head. The Tahiti he actually arrived in had been reshaped for decades by missionaries and colonial rule, so the pure island life here is partly something he composed from a romantic travel book he admired rather than what stood in front of him. That gap between the picture and the place is much of what the painting is.