A colony Gauguin called paradise

In 1897 Paul Gauguin was in Tahiti, in the South Pacific, on his second and final stay. He was poor, he was sick, and he was grieving a daughter, Aline, who had died early that year. He had built his career on leaving: Europe, his old job, the family he started there. Out of this last stretch he set out to paint a single enormous summing-up, a mural-scale statement he ranked above everything else he had done and described, in his letters, in almost biblical terms.

Before the painting, a word about the place, because the painting cannot be understood without it. Gauguin sold Europe a picture of Tahiti as an unspoiled "primitive" paradise, a world of innocence outside money and modern life. That picture was largely his invention. The real Tahiti was a French colony, and French colonial rule and missionary Christianity were already busy dismantling the island’s own culture. Much of the "authentic" imagery Gauguin painted, the idols and rituals, was made up or imported rather than living Tahitian religion. He was exoticizing a colonized people for a European art audience, and the paradise on his canvases is a romantic fiction laid over a society his own civilization was taking apart.

Any account of Gauguin’s Tahiti has to include this, even if she never appears in this particular canvas. During his Tahitian years he took a series of very young local girls as "wives." Teha’amana, the model behind several of his Tahiti pictures, was about thirteen by his own account, the arrangement made in a single afternoon. Such arrangements were common among French colonists, which made them ordinary, not innocent: the power gap between a middle-aged European man and a colonized child was total, and whether the girls consented in any meaningful sense is unknowable. The "paradise" this painting depicts is inseparable from that, and the tortured-genius-in-paradise legend should not be allowed to paint over it.