The Large Tree

The Large Tree (1891) at the Cleveland Museum of Art belongs to Gauguin's first months in Tahiti, when the tropical landscape's specific botanical character — the massive tamanu trees, the breadfruit, the pandanus — was still visually overwhelming. He had arrived in Tahiti in June 1891 seeking the 'primitive' world he believed existed in the Pacific, and the scale and character of the tropical vegetation was unlike anything in his European experience. The large tree as a subject carries both formal and symbolic weight in his Polynesian work: formally, its massive trunk and spreading canopy created a compositional structure that could organize the rest of the picture; symbolically, the great tree was a presence Gauguin associated with the spiritual animism he attributed to Polynesian culture. He believed — inaccurately, as he was working with a largely Christianized and colonially administered Tahiti — that the traditional Polynesian relationship to the natural world was one of direct spiritual communication. The Cleveland Museum's holdings of Gauguin's first Tahitian period are among the finest in America.

The tree trunk is rendered with powerful vertical impetus, its roots gripping the orange earth and its canopy spreading above. The colours are richly saturated — deep ochre earth, vivid greens, patches of sky blue — applied with Gauguin's characteristic flat zones bounded by definitive contours. The scale relationship between figure and tree reinforces the tree's monumental, almost sacred stature.