Rave te hiti aamu (The Idol)

'Rave te hiti aamu' (The Idol), now at the Hermitage Museum, was painted in 1898 and depicts a standing female figure against a background that includes a carved idol—the kind of pre-Christian Polynesian religious object that Gauguin incorporated into his work as evidence of a spiritual tradition he felt had been destroyed by missionary Christianity. The idol-figure in Gauguin's work carried complex meaning: both an authentic remnant of Polynesian culture and a symbol of the non-Western spiritual vitality he sought and never quite found on the modernized island.

The idol is rendered with the same flat, simplified treatment as the living figure before it, collapsing the distinction between the sculptural object and the human body into a unified pictorial surface. The large areas of resonant color—deep greens, warm earth, blue shadows—create the dense, saturated atmosphere characteristic of Gauguin's second Tahitian stay.