Vairumati tei oa

Vairumati tei oa (Her Name Was Vairumati, 1892) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is one of Gauguin's most deliberately mythological Tahitian canvases, depicting the ancestress figure Vairaumati from traditional Polynesian genealogy — the woman who was the consort of the supreme god Oro and the ancestor of the Areoi society. He had researched this mythology through Moerenhout's ethnographic text and through his own conversations with Polynesian people, and the canvas represents his most sustained attempt to construct an authentic mythological iconography for his Polynesian subjects. The figure's pose — frontal, monumental, self-contained — combined with the symbolic birds and natural elements around her created a visual language for the sacred feminine in a non-Western tradition. The Pushkin's multiple major Gauguins from the first Tahitian stay — including this canvas alongside Aha Oe Feii? and Piti Teina — form one of the most significant concentrations of his Pacific work outside France and America.

The figure occupies the canvas centre in a near-frontal pose that gives her the quality of an icon or cult image. Background elements — birds, symbolic objects — are integrated as flat decorative forms without competing spatially.