Piti Teina

Piti Teina (Two Sisters, 1892) at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg belongs to the rich sequence of paired-figure compositions Gauguin made during his first Tahitian year, when the specific quality of female companionship in the Polynesian landscape was one of his primary subjects. The two sisters of the title were probably based on observed Tahitian women, and the pairing created a compositional dialogue between two figures that he explored with particular concentration during 1892. The Hermitage's extraordinary collection of Gauguins from the first Tahitian stay — including this canvas alongside Aha Oe Feii?, Taperaa Mahana, and Vairumati tei oa — represents one of the world's finest single-institution concentrations of work from this period. Sergei Shchukin acquired most of these works in the early twentieth century, recognizing that Gauguin's Tahitian production from 1891-93 was among the most important achievements in modern painting.

The paired figures provide a composition of near-symmetric tension, each figure balancing the other in weight, posture, and colour. Gauguin uses difference in clothing — contrasting pale garments with darker or patterned ones — to distinguish figures.