Et l'or de leur corps

And the Gold of Their Bodies, painted in 1901, belongs to Gauguin's late Polynesian synthesis — the golden-skinned women of the title rendered in the warm ochres and pinks that had become his definitive palette for the human figure in tropical light. By 1901 he had spent nearly a decade in Polynesia, long enough to have left behind any sense of the exotic and to be painting from deep familiarity with the landscape and its people. The Musée d'Orsay canvas is among the key works in his Polynesian oeuvre — the figures' bodies rendered with the same formal authority he brought to his greatest Tahitian compositions while showing the slight coarsening of touch that his deteriorating health imposed on his late work. The title, derived from his readings in Polynesian mythology and his broader cultural synthesis of European and non-European symbolic traditions, reflects the philosophical ambition that distinguished his Polynesian project from mere exoticism: he was not depicting foreign curiosities but attempting a new synthesis of sensory richness and spiritual depth that European painting had, in his view, lost through its long submission to academic rationalism.

Gauguin renders the Polynesian women with his fully mature Post-Impressionist synthesis — the figures' forms simplified and outlined, the gold and ochre tones of the bodies asserted with the confident directness of his developed style. His palette in the late Polynesian works achieves a harmony of warm golds, rich greens, and deep blues that was uniquely his own. The composition's integration of the figures within the tropical setting creates the visual world of his late Marquesas period — dense, warm, and formally confident.