Taperaa Mahana

Taperaa Mahana (End of Day, 1892) at the Hermitage Museum is a first-Tahitian-stay canvas that captures the specific quality of late afternoon light as it falls across the Polynesian landscape. The temporal specificity of the title — 'end of day' — was unusual for Gauguin, who typically preferred timeless Tahitian titles rather than ones that located his subjects in a specific moment. By 1892 he was systematically documenting different aspects of Tahitian daily experience, and the quality of evening light — its warm raking angle, its specific chromatic quality different from midday — was a subject the Impressionists had explored extensively in the French landscape. His treatment of the same temporal quality in the Pacific landscape transformed the atmospheric observation of Impressionism into the flat chromatic language of Synthetism. The Hermitage's Shchukin-collected Gauguins of 1892 form one of the most important concentrations of his first-stay work outside France.

Evening light is rendered through a shift to warmer, deeper tones rather than gradual tonal darkening. Gauguin uses vivid oranges and deep magentas to convey tropical sunset. The landscape elements are simplified to strong colour masses, giving the canvas an almost abstract quality.