Polynesian Woman with Children

Polynesian Woman with Children (1901) at the Art Institute of Chicago was painted in Gauguin's final years on the Marquesas, the more remote island group to which he had moved from Tahiti in 1901. By this late period his formal language had achieved a spare, simplified monumentality in which the domestic subject — a woman with children — was handled with the same formal authority he brought to his most ambitious mythological compositions. He believed the Marquesan culture was less compromised by French colonialism than Tahiti had become, and the domestic scenes he observed in his final years combined genuine ethnographic curiosity with the projective idealization of his primitivist project. The Art Institute of Chicago's collection of late Gauguins from the Marquesas period, including this canvas and the Women and White Horse from 1903, preserves important documentation of his final productive years before his death on Hiva Oa in May 1903.

The figures are rendered in warm earth tones with the simplified volumetric approach of Gauguin's mature Polynesian figure painting. The background is treated as a flat colour field — pale green-gold — that integrates the group into a decorative whole. Outlines are present but softer than in the Cloisonnist period.