Te Fare Amu

Te Fare Amu translates roughly as 'the house for eating' or 'the place where we eat,' and this 1896 canvas at Princeton's Art Museum depicts a scene of domestic Tahitian life centered on food preparation or gathering. Gauguin was deeply interested in the rhythms of everyday Tahitian life, finding in its unhurried pace the antithesis of the anxious European modernity he had fled. Interior and exterior scenes of daily activity gave him opportunities to depict the human figure in naturalistic settings while building his distinctive decorative language of flattened form and resonant color.

The composition balances figural and architectural elements with the characteristic flattening Gauguin achieved by refusing conventional perspectival depth. The warm ochres and greens of the tropical setting are punctuated by the figures' cloth coverings, the overall color architecture unified through a limited palette of adjacent warm tones.