About this work
A gathering of mysterious young women occupies the canvas, reaching for fruit from the branches of plants, their feet solidly anchored on deep red ground.
The sky behind them glows a burning yellow, and the composition is filled by the tall figures — which nearly touch its borders — along with trees that reach beyond the frame, and horizontal bands of ground and sky. The colour areas, whether of bodies, pareos, tree trunks, leaves, or the golden air, are large and well defined.
There is a quality in this canvas that is inevitably called decorative — its rhythmic, slow design suggests the narrow relief space of a sculptured frieze, though in its richer colour harmony and fused tone, tapestry is perhaps the closer parallel.
The colour areas have been softened to give them a rich, sensuous texture, as if by some enveloping atmosphere that affects all surfaces alike.
Gauguin painted *Nave Nave Mahana* in 1896 after returning to Tahiti from a short stay in France.
He had first sailed to Polynesia to escape what he saw as European artifice and convention, only to find the islands already altered by European influence — and his works from this period are accordingly full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticised vision of Polynesian life. By 1896, he had moved through that initial disillusionment toward something more resolved: a warm, unhurried vision of everyday existence that draws comparisons to the classical idylls of Puvis de Chavannes. But where Puvis views his landscapes through a telescope from some distant Olympus, Gauguin brings his tropical version close and warm. The painting's historical weight is considerable: it was the first work by Gauguin to be purchased by a French museum — a remarkable initiative at a time when his style was still not accepted by the public, or even by connoisseurs.
This is a painting that rewards unhurried looking, and it earns its place in rooms designed for the same. The broad, flattened colour fields and warm ochre-and-crimson palette make it generous in low light — it reads equally well by lamp as by afternoon sun. It speaks directly to the viewer drawn to Post-Impressionism's emotional and spiritual depth, or to those who find the grammar of flatness and bold outline — Synthetism at its most composed — more compelling than optical realism. Hung in a dining room, a living space, or any interior where time is meant to slow down, *Nave Nave Mahana* doesn't demand attention so much as it quietly holds it.
