Te Bourao II

Te Bourao II (1897) at an unknown private location depicts the bourao tree — a coastal Tahitian plant known for its broad, waxy leaves — that Gauguin used as a recurring compositional and symbolic element in his Pacific work. By 1897 his engagement with the specific botany of the Tahitian landscape was deep and systematic: the bourao, the tamanu, the hibiscus (burao), the pandanus — each tree or plant carried both observed formal qualities and accumulated cultural and symbolic associations in his iconographic vocabulary. The 1897 date places this canvas in the year of his attempted suicide and the completion of Where Do We Come From? — a period of extreme psychological crisis alongside sustained formal productivity. The canvas's private collection status reflects the wide dispersal of his Polynesian work through the international art market of the twentieth century.

The bourao foliage is rendered in rich, layered greens applied in flat zones that reject atmospheric naturalism in favor of decorative intensity. The bold silhouetting of leaves against lighter backgrounds creates the characteristic synthetist play of positive and negative shape that Gauguin had developed since his Brittany years with Bernard and the Nabis circle.