Street in Tahiti

Street in Tahiti (1891) at the Toledo Museum of Art belongs to the earliest months of Gauguin's first Tahitian stay, when he was still finding his subjects and formal language for the Pacific. The village street as a subject connected his Tahitian practice to his Breton and Norman landscape work, where village streets and country roads had provided the spatial framework for many of his most important compositions. In Tahiti, however, the same street subject carried a different cultural charge: the buildings lining it combined French colonial architecture with traditional Polynesian forms, and the vegetation was tropical rather than temperate. The Toledo Museum of Art, which holds this early Tahitian canvas alongside other significant European paintings, reflects the broad American collecting of Post-Impressionism in the early twentieth century when Gauguin's Pacific work was being recognized as historically important.

The street scene is handled with greater spatial coherence than many of Gauguin's Tahitian works, the perspective recession of the road providing conventional depth into the composition. The color, however, is already heightened beyond naturalism, with the tropical vegetation's greens and yellows pushed to an intensity that declares the painter's presence rather than a window on reality.