Nevermore

Nevermore (1897) at the Courtauld Gallery in London is one of Gauguin's most deliberately literary and psychologically charged Polynesian canvases. The title — taken from Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven — was chosen after the painting was complete, and it imposed an atmosphere of dread and irrevocability on what might otherwise have been read as a conventional reclining nude. The two figures in the background appeared to Gauguin as symbolic presences overseeing the reclining woman, their whispering suggesting the sinister forces that surrounded Polynesian life: colonial administration, missionary religion, disease, and the destruction of traditional culture. The Courtauld Gallery's acquisition of this canvas placed it alongside the major Cézannes, Van Goghs, and Seurats that Samuel Courtauld assembled in the 1920s and 1930s as the core of his understanding of Post-Impressionism's historical achievement. The Courtauld's Nevermore is among the most frequently reproduced and discussed of all Gauguin's paintings, its combination of formal beauty and psychological unease making it a touchstone for his mature Polynesian style.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat planes of non-naturalistic color bounded by dark contour lines — a style he called Synthetism. His palette is saturated and expressive: deep carmines, cadmium yellows, tropical greens, and acid blue-purples.