About this work
is an 1892 oil on canvas painted during Gauguin's first stay on Tahiti. What the eye meets first is a figure study of profound unease: a young nude Tahitian woman occupies the foreground, hiding her genitalia with her left hand and her right breast with her right hand, as she looks back at a kneeling masked man behind her.
The ground beneath her swirls with bright pink, lilac purple, and strokes of canary yellow, while the kneeling man, set to our left and behind, wears a topaz-blue robe and holds his hands on his knees, with a band of vivid orange and kelly green before him suggesting abstracted flowers.
A craggy, dark teal-blue tree trunk curves up and across the background, and a red-and-green-faced serpent floats near the upper right corner — an unmistakable signal that this is no simple genre scene. The palette is simultaneously lush and disquieting, Gauguin's Synthetist instincts pushing every hue past naturalism into the symbolic.
Lured to Tahiti in 1891 by reports of its unspoiled culture, Gauguin was disappointed by its civilized capital and moved to the countryside, where he found an approximation of the tropical paradise he had expected. It was in that rural remove that he painted this canvas, layering his observations of Tahitian life with deeper mythological freight. The pose of the standing nude is derived from a medieval statue of the biblical Eve — and more distantly from the Venus Pudica of classical sculpture — placing a rich combination of references to original sin, the loss of innocence, and Western aesthetic tradition within the context of Tahitian mythology and non-European aesthetics.
The phrase *varua ino* means evil spirit or devil and refers to the masked kneeling figure, while *parau* means words — yet the meaning remains deliberately elusive, and there is little likelihood Gauguin's original Parisian audience could have decoded the Tahitian legends he inscribed on most of the 66 paintings he brought back to Paris in 1892. That productive ambiguity is the point: this is Gauguin at his most Symbolist, constructing a myth rather than illustrating one.
As a print, *Words of the Devil* commands a room that can hold its psychological weight. It belongs in spaces given over to serious looking — a study lined with books, a collector's bedroom, a dark-walled dining room where candlelight catches the pinks and teals. It speaks to viewers drawn to art that resists quick resolution: those who understand that beauty and menace can share a canvas without either canceling the other out. The serpent in the corner, the woman's guarded glance, the masked figure's wide-open eyes — none of it settles. That is precisely what makes living with this image so compelling.
