Fatata te Miti

Fatata te Miti (By the Sea, 1892) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington was painted during Gauguin's most productive first-Tahitian-year period, when the specific combination of figures, tropical landscape, and Pacific water created the compositional vocabulary of his mature Polynesian style. Two women at the water's edge — one diving or bending toward the water, one standing — are embedded in a coastal landscape of tropical vegetation and gently cresting waves. The subject combined elements he had been working with since his Brittany period — figures at the water's edge, the formal problem of how to integrate the human body into a natural setting — and gave them a new tropical particularity. The National Gallery of Art's possession of this canvas alongside several other major Pacific Gauguins makes Washington one of the premier American venues for his work, and Fatata te Miti is among the most important first-stay Tahitian canvases in any American collection.

The figures are treated as large color forms silhouetted against the lighter sea, their bodies reduced to simplified shapes in warm earth tones. The background water is painted in broad, flat zones of blue and green that assert the painting's decorative two-dimensionality, while the figures' soft contours float on the surface rather than occupying three-dimensional space.