Vairumati

Vairumati was completed during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, around 1897, and depicts the legendary ancestress of the Areoi society, a sacred Polynesian order whose mythology Gauguin had studied through Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's 1837 text Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan. The painting pairs the standing figure with a white bird and a lizard, motifs drawn from Polynesian cosmology as Gauguin understood and freely adapted it. It belongs to the same mythological cycle as his monumental Where Do We Come From? painted the same year, both works projecting a constructed Pacific spirituality that was partly invention and partly sincere search for an alternative to Western materialism.

Vairumati stands in a flattened interior space, her form outlined and filled with warm ochre flesh against a background of angular decorative motifs. The palette is warm and rich with repeated notes of gold, red, and deep green. Compositionally the figure is frontal and static, recalling Egyptian relief conventions Gauguin admired.