Two Tahitian Women by Paul Gauguin

French painter Paul Gauguin was a leading figure in postimpressionist art during the 1880s and 1890s. Best known for his striking coloring and the symbolist, pictoral composition of his art, his influence on modern painting was extraordinary. He continually experimented with new techniques and coloring his most influential work led directly to the so-called synthestist style of later years. His unique, cloisonnist style also paved the way to primitivism and a return to a more pastoral style of painting.

A constant traveler with a thirst for ever more exotic subjects and motifs (he spent 4 years of his childhood with his mother in Peru and later travelled extensively with the merchant navy as a young man) he is of course best known for the many works he created during his long stay on the Pacific island of Tahiti.

It was also here too, shortly before Gauguin brought his work on this island paradise to a close, where he shifted from his symbolist pictorial agenda and began to focus in a more representational way upon the serene beauty of the native women. It was during this time that he made a conscious effort to express through painting certain sentiments he attributed to what he called his “Tahitian Eve”, elements of innocence, subtlety and naïveté, clearly evident in a culture in which nudity was experienced without shame.

And his efforts succeed wonderfully here with Two Tahitian Women, painted in 1899, currently displayed at the Met Museum in New York. These two beautiful women are actually familiar Gauguin subjects, however. They appeared first in his monumental frieze Tahitian Pastoral (1898) and later in an even larger painting entitled Rupe, Rupe (1899). But regardless of which of these three paintings you get the opportunity to admire, Gauguin’s fabulous living colors and the exotic Garden of Eden subjects he has chosen to bring to life are stunning works of art to behold.

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