About this work
A severed head rests on a low table or serving platter, presented with only a hint of blood; a despairing nude woman crouches nearby, while a figure just outside the room seems to proclaim the man's death to still more people further away.
The interior is rich with Tiki-like figures and suggestive geometric patterns, and the notion of a human head ritually displayed in an ornate interior suggests the formality of a ruler lying in state, supported by the presence of sorrowful figures in the background.
Gauguin achieves a tropical sensibility through a color palette ranging from muted purples and browns to yellows, reds, and vivid pinks — and the rustic, exotic qualities of his imaginary "palace" are underscored by the artist's choice of a rough, burlap-like cloth for his canvas.
The words "Arii" — meaning "noble" or "royal" — and "Matamoe" — meaning "sleeping eyes," implying death — are written in the upper left background above the severed head.
Painted in 1892, oil on coarse fabric, the work emerged during Gauguin's first extended stay in Tahiti. The death of Pōmare V not long after Gauguin's arrival, as well as his witnessing of a public execution by guillotine several years earlier, are both thought to have informed the work.
Freely mixing Eastern and Western influences, Gauguin combined motifs and imagery borrowed from Tahitian, Javanese, French, and Peruvian sources, creating a rich symbolic mélange.
In his collage-illustrated book *Noa Noa*, he included a copy of the painting alongside a comment that Pōmare's death was a metaphor for the loss of native culture due to European colonization.
Getty curator Scott C. Allan has argued that *Arii Matamoe* is both a "symbolic self-portrait" and a "self-mythologizing work," hinting at possible redemption and renewal. After decades in private hands, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced its purchase in 2008, and at the time the Getty's curator of paintings called it "the most famous painting by Gauguin that no one has seen."
This is not a painting that recedes into a wall — it commands the room. Its horizontal format and dense, interlocking palette of jeweled pinks, burnt yellows, and shadowed purples make it best suited to a contemplative interior: a study, a library, or a living room where darkness and warmth coexist comfortably. Symbolist artists,
