Sister of Charity

Sister of Charity was painted by Gauguin during his second Tahitian stay and depicts a Catholic nun — one of the religious missionaries who were transforming Tahitian culture under French colonial administration. Gauguin had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the French Catholic mission in Polynesia: he was baptised Catholic and occasionally drew on Christian iconography, but he resented the missionaries' destruction of traditional Polynesian religious practice, which he documented in his notebook 'Ancien Culte Mahorie.' The Sister of Charity represents the colonial presence he was simultaneously part of and at war with.

The nun's white habit provides a striking formal element — a large light mass in the composition. The figure is rendered with Gauguin's simplified volumetric approach to figure painting. The background setting, likely a Tahitian garden or interior, is treated as a flat colour field consistent with his mature Polynesian manner.