Tahitian Woman and Boy

Tahitian Woman and Boy (1899) at the Norton Simon Museum was painted during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, in the quieter period after the creative storm of the mid-1890s that had produced the monumental Where Do We Come From? By 1899 his health was declining and his personal circumstances were difficult, and the domestic calm of the mother-and-child composition reflects a momentary withdrawal from the ambitious philosophical program of the previous years. The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which holds this canvas alongside its major collection of European and Asian art, acquired it through the broad American collecting of Post-Impressionist work that accelerated after the Second World War. The Tahitian woman's solid, self-possessed presence — rendered with the full authority of Gauguin's mature Polynesian figure style — belongs to the series of late works that demonstrate the sustained quality of his formal powers even as his physical condition deteriorated.

The woman's figure is built with the monumental simplicity of Gauguin's mature Polynesian figure painting. The boy beside her is rendered in smaller, rounder forms. The background — flat green with some floral decoration — provides a unified chromatic ground. Flesh tones are warm and unmodulated, defined by clean colour boundaries.