Fatata te Miti

'Fatata te Miti' translates as 'near the sea' in Tahitian, and this 1892 canvas at Washington's National Gallery of Art depicts two women bathing near the Tahitian shore with a figure in a canoe beyond. Bathing subjects allowed Gauguin to paint the nude or near-nude Tahitian figure in a natural context that sidestepped European conventions of the academic nude while exploring the sensuous relationship between the Polynesian body and its tropical environment. The sea provides a spatial backdrop that emphasizes the flat, decorative treatment of the foreground figures.

The figures are treated as large color forms silhouetted against the lighter sea, their bodies reduced to simplified shapes in warm earth tones. The background water is painted in broad, flat zones of blue and green that assert the painting's decorative two-dimensionality, while the figures' soft contours float on the surface rather than occupying three-dimensional space.