When Will You Marry?

When Will You Marry? (Nafea faa ipoipo?, 1892) at the Kunstmuseum Basel is among the most celebrated of Gauguin's first Tahitian canvases — a large composition of two Tahitian women in a landscape that became one of the most valuable paintings in the world when it sold for nearly $300 million in 2015. The work's extraordinary market value reflects the intensity of demand for first-rank Tahitian Gauguins from the period 1891-1893, when his formal language and his Polynesian vision were at their most freshly productive. The question in the Tahitian title — 'when will you marry?' — may have been a fragment of conversation he overheard, or it may have been imposed retrospectively; in either case it creates a social dimension around the two women that the purely formal approach to the composition does not require. The Kunstmuseum Basel holds this canvas alongside major works by Holbein, Böcklin, and the Swiss Impressionists, making it the most significant Swiss museum for understanding the full range of Western painting from the Renaissance through Post-Impressionism.

The composition is tightly structured around two female figures set against a richly coloured background of pink flowers and green foliage. Gauguin distinguishes the women through dress and flower — the younger wears a white bloom in her hair.