Eu haere ia oe

Eu haere ia oe (Where Are You Going?, 1893) at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is a late first-stay Tahitian canvas, painted just before Gauguin's return to France and belonging to the sequence of works that documented and synthesized his two years in the Pacific. The title's question — addressed by or to the woman moving through the landscape — captures the ambiguity of his Tahitian subjects: the Tahitian-language question could be read as a greeting (Polynesian culture used it as a standard social exchange) or as a philosophical inquiry about purpose and direction. By 1893 his Tahitian iconographic vocabulary was fully formed, and this canvas is notable for the confidence with which the moving figure is integrated into the tropical landscape. The Hermitage's major Gauguin collection — assembled from the Shchukin and Morozov collections nationalized after 1917 — includes this canvas alongside several other important Pacific works, making St. Petersburg one of the essential destinations for studying Gauguin's Polynesian achievement.

The figure moves through a landscape of simplified tropical forms, her body rendered in the warm terracotta and ochre tones Gauguin favored for Tahitian figures. The synthetist flattening of form and the non-naturalistic color of the landscape behind her demonstrate the decorative pictorial language he had fully developed by the end of his first Pacific stay.