Women and a White Horse

Women and a White Horse (1903) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is among the last major works Gauguin completed before his death in May 1903. The white horse had been a recurring symbol in his Tahitian work — appearing in several compositions from the first and second stays as a presence associated with purity, spiritual power, and the pre-contact Polynesian world — and its final appearance here in a Marquesan landscape carries the accumulated resonance of a decade of use. The women of the painting are Marquesan, and the canvas belongs to the group of late works that Gauguin himself recognized as summative — gathered from the whole experience of his Pacific years, synthesized into a formal statement of lasting clarity. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Gauguins from the late 1880s through his final Marquesan period is among the most comprehensive in America, and the Women and a White Horse is the chronological endpoint of that collection.

The white horse provides a luminous central form against the deep, jewel-like colours of the tropical setting. Its whiteness — rendered in blues, greens, and pink-whites — creates a focal radiance. The figures are painted with the spare, assured line of Gauguin's late style. Deep, saturated greens and earth reds frame the composition in the rich colour harmony that characterises his final Marquesan period.