Barbarian Poems

Barbarian Poems, held at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, takes its title from a collection of poetry by Leconte de Lisle, a Symbolist-aligned writer whose work Gauguin admired. Painted in 1896 in Tahiti, the work belongs to the period of Gauguin's second Polynesian sojourn, when his imagery had fully absorbed the formal strategies of Tahitian visual culture — flattened colour planes, bold outlines, figures disposed across the canvas without Western spatial recession. The literary title links the image to European Symbolism even as its visual logic follows non-European conventions.

Gauguin composes the image in characteristic synthetist manner — large areas of unmodulated colour bounded by strong contours, figures placed without cast shadows. The palette deploys the warm ochres, deep reds, and blue-greens that became his Polynesian signature, while the decorative patterning of textiles and foliage flattens any residual illusionistic depth.