Gauguin’s exposure to Māori art might have begun at the 1878 Universelle Exposition in Paris. He also frequently visited the anthropological collection rooms of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, which opened in 1882.

Displays of artworks from the Pacific in Gauguin’s time often included objects similar to this gable figure, or tekoteko. Māori stories tell of Tangaroa, the god of the sea, who captured Te Manuhauturuki. Tangaroa placed Te Manuhauturuki’s immobilized body on the gable of his house under the sea, creating the first tekoteko. The carved ancestor of this tekoteko is depicted in a war dance posture (haka) with his full-face tattoo (rangi paruhi) and abalone shell (paua) eyes.

In April 1891 Gauguin traveled to Tahiti under the auspices of the French Ministry of Fine Arts, “in order to execute a number of paintings from a country whose character and light I [Gauguin] wish to capture.” That fall, Gauguin painted twenty scenes of village life. This composition corresponds to colonial, ethnographic-style photography of the time, showing figures engaged in their daily routines and represented within an idealized Tahitian landscape, as a European audience would perceive it. In their placement, the seated, standing, and walking figures play a decorative role as forms that lead the eye to into the depths of the landscape.

Gauguin remarked, “In the Marquesan especially there is an unparalleled sense of decoration . . . the basis is the human body or the face, especially the face. One is astonished to find a face where one thought there was nothing but a strange geometric figure.”

This life-size study was featured in the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 and was praised by the critic Joris-Karl Huysmans for “representing a woman of our time.” Gauguin’s son Pola identified the subject as a family nursemaid, Justine, but the identity of the sitter remains a matter of speculation among scholars.

After meeting Gauguin at Arosa’s home, Pissarro became his friend, mentor, and teacher. Gauguin later described Pissarro as “one of his masters.” The two artists often painted the same scene when working together at Pissarro’s home in Osny, a village northwest of Paris. Pissarro also encouraged Gauguin during his early career, inviting him to participate in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879.

Gauguin’s relationships with and representations of women are a central theme in the artist’s career. This aspect of Gauguin’s biography can be challenging for some contemporary viewers given current views about sexual morality and women’s rights.

While living in Tahiti and the Marquesas, Gauguin had relationships with at least three women: Teha’amana (Tahiti), Pau’ura a Tai (Pahura) (Tahiti), and Vaeoho Marie-Rose (Marquesas Islands), who each bore one or more of Gauguin’s children. These companions ranged in ages from 13 to 15, within the legal age of consent (13 in France at that time; 10 in California), and at least two of the relationships were perhaps facilitated by adult relatives. However, the women’s own preferences in entering these relationships are not documented or otherwise known. They were mentioned in his letters, featured in his journals, and were the subjects of many of his most striking artworks. They appear as models, muses, mothers, companions, and lovers—and as a Tahitian Eve. While Gauguin is the source for most of what we know about the lives of these young women, new research is revealing more about their personal stories.

Gauguin lived his life with the singular determination to follow his own spiritual journey and become an accomplished artist. Two compositions—one painted at the beginning and one near the end of his career, Still Life with Flowers and Flowers and Cats—document the artist’s ingenuity and also his challenges. In Still Life with Flowers, Gauguin unsettled his traditional subject with the abstracted bedpost at the right of the composition, foreshadowing the enigmatic Symbolist style of his future work. Gauguin often introduced elements in his pictures to make his viewers wonder and question. By comparison, Flowers and Cats includes a bouquet of flowers Gauguin cultivated from seeds sent from France by a fellow artist. Painted in Tahiti, at the encouragement of his dealer, the painting shows Gauguin’s inability to completely abandon the art market and the culture of Europe.

Of his time in Brittany Gauguin, wrote, “I like Brittany. Here I find the wild, the primitive. When my clogs echo on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled, powerful note that I am seeking in painting.” Gauguin’s Landscape from Brittany with Breton Women shows Brittany as an isolated French province, where time seems to stand still. The women wear their local dress complete with elaborate headdresses, and a cow ambles freely through a village. In Brittany, peasant beliefs blended Catholicism with ancestral practices, providing Gauguin with a world of symbols to inspire his art and spirituality.

After his arrival in Tahiti, Gauguin was eager to learn about Tahitian beliefs from local residents and sites. In his partially fictional memoir, Noa Noa, which he later published in Paris to promote his Tahitian paintings, Gauguin describes receiving instruction about Tahitian theology from his vahine—companion and model—called Tehura (Teha’amana). However, it is evident that he drew heavily on an account of the islands by Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, Voyages aux îles du Grand océan, (Travels to the Islands of the Pacific Ocean), published in 1837. He used the text to infuse his paintings with religious images and themes. Although it looks like a painting from Tahiti, Gauguin painted Reclining Tahitian Women in Brittany in 1894 after his first sojourn to the islands.