Landscape with Two Goats (Tarari Maruru)

Landscape with Two Goats (Tarari Maruru, 1897) at the Hermitage Museum belongs to the period of Gauguin's most intense personal crisis during his second Tahitian stay — the year of his attempted suicide and the monumental Where Do We Come From? The landscape with two goats is a more quietly observed work than the philosophical ambitions of that period, and its calm, domestically inflected subject offered a formal respite from the grand metaphysical program. The Tahitian title 'Tarari Maruru' may translate roughly as 'grateful for what exists' or 'contentment in small things,' a reading that gives the modest landscape subject an appropriate philosophical weight for a painter who was simultaneously working on the most ambitious canvas of his career. The Hermitage's extensive Gauguin holdings include this canvas as one of several more intimate works from the second stay alongside the more monumental compositions.

The high horizon and compressed spatial depth give the canvas a decorative, almost tapestry-like quality. The goats are painted with simplified outlines set against dense tropical foliage in multiple greens and yellows. The foreground path and earth tones create a warm base against which the cool vegetative mass reads.