Беседа (Les Parau Parau)

Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891 and quickly began giving his pictures titles in the local language rather than French. This one he called Parau Parau, which means roughly words, words, or simply talk. It shows several women sitting together on the ground in the shade, deep in conversation, with a landscape opening out behind them. He picked up only a rough grasp of Tahitian, and the scene is less a real moment he watched than an image of an unchanging, unhurried way of living that he wanted the island to be. The colours are laid down flat and calm, oranges and greens holding still. Painted in his first year on the island, it eventually travelled to Russia and has hung in Saint Petersburg since 1948.