Month of Mary (Te avae no Maria)

Month of Mary (Te avae no Maria, 1899) at the Hermitage Museum belongs to Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, when his engagement with the intersections between Catholic and Polynesian spiritual traditions was becoming more explicit. The 'month of Mary' is a Catholic devotional observance — May dedicated to the Virgin — that had been introduced to Tahitian life by the French missionaries. Gauguin's choice of this title for a Tahitian figure composition was characteristically syncretic: the Catholic observance and the Polynesian figures were both evidence of the spiritual life he valued as an antidote to modern European materialism, and their coexistence in the same title proposed an equivalence between Catholic Marian devotion and the Polynesian feminine sacred that would have disturbed both missionary and secular observer. The Hermitage's second-stay Gauguins include both this and the Be Be (The Nativity), making the Russian collection important for understanding his late engagement with Christian iconography in a Polynesian setting.

The composition places two figures within a landscape defined by flat color zones of deep green and ochre, the figures' forms simplified into the large, rounded shapes of Gauguin's mature style. The floral elements associated with May devotions are rendered as decorative pattern elements that integrate the figures into their setting.