About this work
Two Tahitian women wearing traditional skirts stand beneath pandanus trees — a palm-like plant with long, spear-shaped leaves — and instantly ground the viewer in a world apart. The figures are clad in red pareos adorned with yellow patterns, one standing contemplatively with a basket as though returning from a gathering, the other with her back turned, carrying a bundle. Between them, a black dog meanders, adding a naturalistic touch that contrasts with the somewhat flat and abstract representation of the landscape.
Gauguin suppressed spatial illusionism entirely, constructing the landscape with horizontal bands of color that reinforce the two-dimensionality of the canvas.
The red fabric of the pareos forms a bold contrast to the brilliant green field to the left — a daring manipulation of complementary colors — while the reddish-brown earth bears a calligraphic pattern of undulating yellow fallen leaves that gives the impression of hot, molten material. In the far distance, glimpses of beach and sea under a tranquil sky provide a vivid backdrop, hinting at the idyllic life on the island.
Gauguin painted *Under the Pandanus* in 1891, a few months after he arrived in Tahiti for the first time.
Sometime later — possibly the next year — he painted a second version of the composition, now held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Dallas Museum of Art version, the primary canvas, belongs to this first, electrifying wave of Tahitian production — work made when the island's distance from Europe still carried the charge of arrival. In Tahiti, Gauguin sought an exotic world far from Western civilization, a place of brilliant colors and foreign custom, finding both the real and psychological distance to pursue his radical aesthetic goal of an art that does not copy nature.
The style is classified as Cloisonnism, with the contrast of light and shadow, flattened forms, and bold outlines characteristic of that approach, which emphasizes the delineation of distinct color fields.
The pandanus itself — the screw pine whose symbolic abundance pervades the canvas — is native to many Pacific archipelagoes, providing roof, sustenance, adornment, and medicine to generations of islanders.
This is a painting that rewards warm, indirect light and a wall with room to breathe around it. The earthy reds, cadmium yellows, and deep greens hold their intensity in natural daylight and settle into something more smoldering by lamplight — making it as suited to a sunlit reading room as to a warmly lit dining space. It speaks to the collector
