Et l'or de leur corps

Paul Gauguin's 'Et l'or de leur corps' (And the Gold of Their Bodies, 1901) is among his late Marquesas works — executed in the final years of his life in the Marquesas Islands, where he had moved from Tahiti seeking an even more remote and authentic non-European world. The golden-bodied Polynesian women of the title, depicted in the warm ochre and gold tones that had become his signature palette for Polynesian subjects, represented the culmination of his lifelong search for a world of sensuous beauty and authentic human experience uncorrupted by European civilization.

Gauguin renders the Polynesian women with his fully mature Post-Impressionist synthesis — the figures' forms simplified and outlined, the gold and ochre tones of the bodies asserted with the confident directness of his developed style. His palette in the late Polynesian works achieves a harmony of warm golds, rich greens, and deep blues that was uniquely his own. The composition's integration of the figures within the tropical setting creates the visual world of his late Marquesas period — dense, warm, and formally confident.