Polynesian Woman with Children

Polynesian Woman with Children was painted during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay (1901–1903) and represents his most sustained engagement with the subject of maternal domesticity translated into a Polynesian context. By this late period Gauguin had moved to the Marquesas, where he found a culture he believed less corrupted by French colonial influence than Tahiti had become. The children in the painting are likely Marquesan rather than Tahitian, and the relaxed domestic grouping was observed from life though filtered through the compositional formulas Gauguin had been developing for a decade.

The figures are rendered in warm earth tones with the simplified volumetric approach of Gauguin's mature Polynesian figure painting. The background is treated as a flat colour field — pale green-gold — that integrates the group into a decorative whole. Outlines are present but softer than in the Cloisonnist period.