Te Pape Nave Nave (Delectable Waters)

Painted in 1898 at a moment of extreme personal crisis — shortly after Gauguin had attempted suicide and despaired of his reception in France — this large canvas is one of his most ambitious and emotionally complex Tahitian works. The Tahitian title translates as 'Delectable Waters,' and the peaceful figures bathing in a tropical pool suggest a recovered serenity after crisis. Now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this late Tahitian work shows Gauguin moving toward the spacious, luminous calm of his final years, having passed through the despair that produced the monumental Where Do We Come From?

The composition is structured around the mirror-like reflective quality of the pool, which creates a horizontal calm at the centre. Figures are arranged with the processional, frieze-like dignity of Gauguin's mature Polynesian style. Warm flesh tones are set against cool water blues. The paint surface is smooth and relatively controlled, without the rough impasto of some earlier works.