Description

Tahitian Women on the Beach (French: Femmes de Tahiti), an 1891 oil painting by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.
Artwork Details
Artist: Paul Gauguin
Year: 1891
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
Context
Gauguin traveled to Tahiti in search of an “unspoiled, Edenic world” away from European materialism. The painting depicts two local women in a tranquil pose on the sand, with a lagoon and the sea in the background. The woman on the left wears a traditional sarong, while the woman on the right wears a Christian missionary-style dress, illustrating the mix of native culture and colonial influence that Gauguin observed. Gauguin utilized bold outlines and flat areas of intense color, a style known as Synthetism, to evoke a sense of symbolism and mystery rather than strict realism.