Nave Nave Mahana

Nave Nave Mahana (Delicious Days/Wonderful Day, 1896) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon is among the most ambitious multi-figure compositions of Gauguin's second Tahitian stay. The large scale, the horizontal processional arrangement of the figures, and the rich chromatic harmony of the whole canvas reflect his most sustained ambitions for the Tahitian figure painting as a monumental art form. He had studied the friezes of the Javanese Buddhist temple of Borobudur through photographs at the 1889 Paris World's Fair, and the figures' lateral movement across the canvas surface echoes that processional quality while insisting on the Pacific specificity of their setting and identity. The Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, which holds this important canvas, is one of France's major regional museums with strong holdings across the full range of French painting from the Renaissance through the twentieth century; this Gauguin's presence there reflects the distribution of major Post-Impressionist works to provincial French institutions as the Paris market dispersed through the early twentieth century.

The large composition is organized as a frieze of figures moving parallel to the picture plane, a format that Gauguin used for several major Tahitian canvases and that reflects his interest in non-European decorative traditions including Javanese temple reliefs he had studied at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. The color is rich and sustained across the full picture field.