Landscape with Three Figures

Dating to 1901, this canvas was produced on the Marquesas island of Hiva Oa, where Gauguin had settled in his final years after finding Tahiti too colonised and commercialised. The three figures set in landscape represent his fullest integration of Polynesian figural types with the flattened, symbolic landscape treatment he had evolved since the Pont-Aven years. The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh holds this work as part of a strong American collection of his late Oceanic period. By 1901 Gauguin's health was declining but his painterly ambition remained intact, and large multi-figure compositions in landscape were his primary form.

The figures are rendered with the bold, simplified outlines of Synthetism, their bodies integrated into the landscape through colour rhyming rather than spatial recession. Gauguin's characteristic rich earth tones—ochre, sienna, deep green—unify figures and ground into a single decorative plane.