The Siesta

The Siesta (c.1892-94) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is among the most domestically observed of Gauguin's Tahitian compositions — a scene of women resting in the midday heat, their relaxed poses conveying the specific quality of Polynesian daily life at the hottest part of the day. The siesta as a subject was unusual for Gauguin, who more typically depicted his Tahitian subjects in states of active ceremony or timeless stasis rather than in the specific rhythms of daily life. The composition's relaxed arrangement of figures in different positions of repose created a more informal, less hieratic spatial organization than his more programmatic mythological works. The Metropolitan's possession of this canvas alongside the Three Tahitian Women, the Tahitian Women Bathing, and several other major Pacific works gives New York the most comprehensive single-institution survey of his Polynesian production in America.

Horizontal figures in rest allow Gauguin to explore the relationship between the body and the ground plane without conventional spatial recession. He places the women close to the picture surface, their forms creating a decorative arrangement of colour and rhythm.