Nave Nave Mahana

'Nave Nave Mahana' translates as 'delicious days' or 'wonderful day,' and this major 1896 canvas at Lyon's Museum of Fine Arts depicts a group of Tahitian women in a landscape, their poses suggesting a ritualistic or ceremonial gathering that Gauguin associated with a primal, uncorrupted existence. The work belongs to the ambitious compositions of his second Tahitian stay, when he was working on a larger scale and with greater compositional complexity than in his first Pacific period. The title's combination of 'nave nave' (delicious) with 'mahana' (day/sun) summarizes his vision of Tahitian life as an experience of pure sensory pleasure.

The large composition is organized as a frieze of figures moving parallel to the picture plane, a format that Gauguin used for several major Tahitian canvases and that reflects his interest in non-European decorative traditions including Javanese temple reliefs he had studied at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. The color is rich and sustained across the full picture field.