The King's Wife

The King's Wife (Te arii vahine, 1896) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is Gauguin's most explicit engagement with the tradition of the reclining female nude as an image of sovereign feminine authority. He had in mind both the Western tradition — Titian's Venus of Urbino, Manet's Olympia — and the Polynesian concept of the arii, the chiefly class whose authority derived from sacred genealogy. By titling his reclining Tahitian nude 'The King's Wife,' he situated her within a specific social hierarchy while also making her the equivalent of the Western nude goddesses he was consciously invoking. Manet's Olympia had stripped away the mythological pretense from the traditional reclining nude by placing a modern Parisian courtesan in the Venus pose; Gauguin's riposte was to restore the sacred dimension by placing a Tahitian woman of chiefly lineage in the same compositional structure. The Pushkin's three major second-Tahitian-stay Gauguins — this canvas, Not to Work, and Matamoe — form one of the world's most important concentrations of his Pacific work.

The woman's figure occupies the lower foreground of the canvas in a reclining pose of complete compositional stability. Gauguin models her with warm ochre and golden flesh tones, the body framed by dense tropical foliage painted in deep greens and blues. The background trees and fruit create a decorative canopy that functions almost as a throne room setting.