The Invocation

The Invocation was painted during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay (1903) and belongs among his final works, painted on the Marquesas Islands where he had moved in 1901. The three female figures in an attitude of prayer or supplication represent Gauguin's late attempt to fuse the Polynesian spiritual world with the formal language of medieval European devotional painting — he was collecting photographs of Gothic sculpture and Byzantine mosaics alongside Javanese temple friezes. The figures' frontal, hieratic arrangement echoes his study of Japanese prints and archaic Greek sculpture rather than any Tahitian ritual he actually witnessed.

The three figures are arranged symmetrically in the frontal, archaic manner Gauguin developed in his late work under the influence of non-Western sculptural sources. The palette is rich and deeply saturated — rust, gold, deep green — with minimal tonal modelling. The flat decorative background integrates the figures into a unified colour field.