The King's Wife

The King's Wife (Te arii vahine), at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, is among the most hieratic of Gauguin's Polynesian paintings, presenting a reclining nude woman with the formal solemnity of a queen or goddess. Painted in 1896 during his second Tahitian sojourn, the work draws on Manet's Olympia as a reference point — a reclining female nude establishing her own authority — while replacing Parisian irony with Polynesian ceremony. Gauguin described the painting in letters to correspondents in France, aware that it would provoke as much as enchant.

The woman's figure occupies the lower foreground of the canvas in a reclining pose of complete compositional stability. Gauguin models her with warm ochre and golden flesh tones, the body framed by dense tropical foliage painted in deep greens and blues. The background trees and fruit create a decorative canopy that functions almost as a throne room setting.