Vairumati tei oa

Vairumati tei oa — Her Name is Vairumati — was painted in 1892 and is now in the Pushkin Museum alongside several other major Gauguin Tahitian canvases acquired by Russian collectors. Vairumati is a figure from Polynesian oral tradition, a legendary woman chosen by the god Oro, and Gauguin used this mythological name to elevate his depiction of a Tahitian woman into a realm of symbolic import. His interest in recovering or reconstructing Polynesian mythology from fragmented sources was central to his ambition to create a symbolic art rooted in non-Western tradition.

The figure occupies the canvas centre in a near-frontal pose that gives her the quality of an icon or cult image. Background elements — birds, symbolic objects — are integrated as flat decorative forms without competing spatially.