Matamoe (Death), Landscape with Peacocks

Matamoe (Death/Landscape with Peacocks, 1892) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts belongs to the enigmatic category of Gauguin's Tahitian works in which naturalistic observation and symbolic imagery coexist without resolution. He painted peacocks he observed in Tahitian gardens alongside the specific atmosphere of the tropical landscape, and the juxtaposition of these living symbols of immortality with the death reference of the title creates a meditation on the boundaries between life and death that his Polynesian context charged with particular urgency. The Pushkin Museum's extraordinary collection of French Post-Impressionism — including major Cézannes, Gauguins, and early Matisses assembled by Shchukin and Morozov before the Russian Revolution — was nationalized after 1917 and consolidated in Moscow, making the Pushkin one of the world's great repositories of French modernism. This Tahitian canvas is among its most important Gauguin holdings alongside Not to Work and The King's Wife from the same period.

The composition combines a decorative foreground of peacocks with a receding Tahitian landscape of deep greens and blues. Gauguin's handling is more varied here than his Brittany work — the vegetation is painted with rich, thick strokes while the peacocks are rendered with careful decorative detail. The palette is luminous and tropical.