Te Arii Vahine 'The Queen, the King's Wife' (1896) by Paul Gauguin, Art Print from the Original on Satin Canvas

Original public domain image from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, digitally enhanced. Oil on canvas.

Original dimensions: 97 cm. x 130 cm.

Paul Gauguin abandoned his native France for most of the 1890s to live on the remote Pacific island of Tahiti, a French colony after 1881.

He was attracted to the purity of nature and what he saw as the primitive culture of its people. Gauguin shared the fantasy of many Europeans of the time that Tahiti was a sort of Garden of Eden, a tropical paradise. There was an element of eroticism in the French cultural imagination regarding colonised lands such as Tahiti. They considered the island’s resources and tropical charms, as well as the island’s women, to be, in effect, freely available.

Paul Gauguin’s own relationship with Tahiti is somewhat more complex. On the one hand, he strove to represent the richness of the island and the local culture and rituals in his work. On the other, Gauguin perpetuated the myths and stereotypes associated with Tahitian culture by freely transforming or even inventing seemingly authentic versions of these activities in order to make them look how he thought “primitive” culture should be.

This work, Te Arii Vahine 'The Queen, the King's Wife', epitomises Gauguin’s erotic fantasy of Tahiti. The young, naked Tahitian woman seems to become part of the fertile landscape, both of which the artist represents as beautifully seductive. The central figure reclines on a grassy hill alongside several brightly coloured ripe mangoes. There is a white cloth covering her groin, and she holds a large round fan behind her head.

Her skin colour, mask-like facial features, and the setting in which she is placed clearly mark her as a native. At the same time, her iconic pose is a reference to a European tradition of painting reclining nymphs and odalisques that dates back at least as far as the sixteenth century. Here, Gauguin merges those erotic associations with the exotic, tropical imagery that fills the canvas.

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