Piti Teina

Piti Teina — Two Sisters — was painted in 1892 and shipped to Europe with the Tahitian canvases Gauguin sent back for his 1893 Paris exhibition. It is now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, part of the significant group of his works that entered Russian imperial and then state collections. The title focuses on the sisterly relationship between the two figures — a structural device Gauguin used frequently, pairing figures of similar age and type to create visual and psychological balance within his compositions.

The paired figures provide a composition of near-symmetric tension, each figure balancing the other in weight, posture, and colour. Gauguin uses difference in clothing — contrasting pale garments with darker or patterned ones — to distinguish figures.