Tahitian Woman with a Flower

A Tahitian woman with a flower—tiare or hibiscus—held in the hair was among Gauguin's most recurrent compositional motifs during his first Tahitian stay, combining the immediacy of portraiture with the ethnographic specificity of Tahitian dress customs. This 1891 canvas at Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is among his earliest Tahitian portraits, painted in the months after his arrival when the novelty of Polynesian faces and customs was still fresh. The single figure with flower established a format he would return to throughout his Pacific career.

The figure is presented against a flattened background in which the decorative patterning of the wall or cloth behind her is given equal visual weight to the figure itself. The woman's face is modeled with a directness that preserves something of the observed portrait while the overall composition pushes toward the synthetist flattening that would dominate his later work.