When Will You Marry?

Paul Gauguin painted this canvas in 1892, during his first stay in Tahiti. It shows two women seated on the ground, placed on different planes. The woman in the foreground wears a pareo in traditional colours and a white blouse. Behind her, somewhat further back, another woman wears a closed, pink dress in the style of missionary clothing, and her raised hand seems to ask for attention.

The Tahitian title, Nafea faa ipoipo?, is incomplete. It combines the interrogative "when" with the verb "to marry", but a personal pronoun is missing, so its exact meaning is uncertain. For the Durand-Ruel gallery exhibition, Gauguin rendered it in French as Quand te maries-tu?, which is the source of the usual English version, "When Will You Marry?".

The background is built from flat, vivid areas of colour: dark green grass in the foreground, a golden meadow in the centre and the distant blue of the mountains, in a clearing at the foot of Mount Orohena. This simplification recalls Japanese prints, which were much admired at the time. The figures, firmly planted and almost motionless, look more like isolated statues than people caught in an everyday scene.

Here Gauguin uses the double portrait, a format he often employed in his Tahitian work, rather than the European portrait focused on the individual. The model for the young woman in the foreground was Tehe'amana, his companion on the island. He had studied that half-seated, half-crouching pose earlier in a drawing made with pencil, charcoal and pastel, and later repeated it as a secondary figure in other paintings.

The canvas had an unusual history. It was lent on deposit to the Kunstmuseum Basel for almost half a century. In 2015 the family of Rudolf Staechlin sold it, through the Qatar Museums, to an unidentified buyer for around 300 million dollars. Its interest lies in the blend of direct observation, the search for a Tahitian identity and flat forms that anticipate the language of modern art.

Painter

Paul Gauguin

Date

1892

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

101 × 77 cm

Genre

genre art, portrait, figure painting

Depicts

sitting, Gardenia taitensis, Tahiti, woman

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