‘I shall go to Tahiti and I hope to end my days there. I judge that my art, which you like, is only a seedling thus far, and out there I hope to cultivate it for my own pleasure in its primitive and savage state. In order to do that I must have peace and quiet.’ Paul Gauguin wrote these words to Odilon Redon (1840–1916) in September 1890. It would be at least another six months before he actually departed, but his mind was made up. To break free from a ‘rotten civilisation’ that repelled him in every respect, and to finally become the artist he wanted to be, he felt he had to distance himself as far as possible from Europe. In an interview given just before his departure, Gauguin said: ‘I am leaving so that I can be at peace and rid myself of civilisation’s influence.’ Although he intended to settle in Tahiti for good, after a stay of almost exactly two years (from 9 June 1891 to 4 June 1893), Gauguin returned to Paris destitute, in poor health, and disillusioned. He did, however, bring back dozens of revolutionary, colourful, ‘exotic’ paintings; Women on the Banks of the River was one of them.
Women on the Banks of the River as a gift for Jo van Gogh-Bonger
Back in Paris, Gauguin’s primary goal was to earn money. He first attempted this through a widely publicised sale exhibition of his Tahitian work at Durand-Ruel. In addition, he hoped to sell works by fellow artists in his possession through other channels. Before his Tahitian journey, he had left all his own works and those of others in the safekeeping of acquaintances. This included paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).
On his return, it was therefore important to reassemble his collection. Van Gogh had died three years earlier, and his work was slowly but surely beginning to pique the interest of dealers and collectors. Gauguin was aware of this and saw his Van Goghs as a potential source of income. The search for three Van Goghs belonging to him – a version of La Berceuse (1889, Art Institute of Chicago, F506), a version of L’Arlésienne, based on Gauguin’s own drawing (1890, Museu de Arte São Paulo, F542), and Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun (1889, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, F617) – led him to Jo van Gogh-Bonger (1862–1925), the widow of Vincent’s brother Theo. On 29 March 1894 he wrote to her, asking if they were in her possession and, if so, whether she would return them to him. For, as Gauguin wrote: ‘You will easily understand, I hope, that as a close friend of Vincent I am able to keep him in my memory and that I am anxious to have these paintings in my possession.’ After a brief correspondence, in which Gauguin clarified exactly which wheatfield he meant by means of a letter sketch (), he received a roll in May 1894 containing, in all probability, the works he sought. In return, Jo asked for a piece by Gauguin, a request which he honoured. This was Women on the Banks of the River, the only Tahitian Gauguin in her collection. It was later included in the Vincent van Gogh Foundation by her son, and subsequently accommodated in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum. It is very likely that Gauguin added the larger Paris in the Snow to this consignment.
Recurring motifs
Women on the Banks of the River was likely painted towards the end of 1892. The work, which is modest in size, depicts three female figures in a landscape dominated by a giant mango tree. Two of them kneel by a river, probably washing linen, while the third stands further off with a basket under her arm. The scene is painted in warm colours and radiates a languid atmosphere. Although the painting is neither signed nor dated, its composition and motifs link it to other works that the artist himself dated to 1892. Foremost among these is Fatata te Mouà (), which features a similar mango tree, accompanied by a comparable small group of palm trees. Five years earlier, during his trip to Martinique, Gauguin had painted these two types of trees meticulously to convey the distinctly tropical nature of his location. In Fatata te Mouà, the palm trees are to the left of the mango tree, rather than to the right as in Women on the Banks of the River, possibly because Gauguin painted the same group of trees from a different vantage point. The motif of grouped mango and palm trees from Fatata te Mouà also reappears in the more idealised Matamua (), from which Gauguin then reused elements in the painting Pastorales Tahitiennes (). Because of these consistently overlapping motifs, these works, to which Women on the Banks of the River is related, appear to have been painted in quick succession. Since Gauguin wrote in a letter to his friend and confidant Georges-Daniel de Monfreid that he painted Pastorales Tahitiennes in the final days of 1892, it is plausible that the other works in this group also belong to this period.
Paul Gauguin, Fatata te Mouà, 1892, oil on canvas, 68 × 92 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Clinging to an exotic ideal
During this period, Gauguin lived in the village of Mataiea, on the south coast of Tahiti. The first five months of his stay on the island were spent in the capital, Papeete, but disappointment with the extent to which the French colonial presence had suppressed the original local way of life drove him away. He went in search of a ‘more primitive’ place to live, and found it in Mataiea, some 40 kilometres from Papeete. In Noa Noa, the partly fictionalised travelogue Gauguin compiled after his return from Tahiti, he described Mataiea in a way that closely matches his depiction of nature in Fatata te Mouà and, to a lesser extent, Women on the Banks of the River: ‘I am no longer in Papeete, but in the district of Mataiea. On one side, the sea; on the other, the mountain – the gaping mountain, a great crevice sheltered, against the rock, by an enormous group of mango trees. Between the mountain and the sea stood my hut made of bourao wood, and near my hut there was another small one – Fare amu (house for eating).’
In Noa Noa and his painted work, Gauguin clung to a certain exotic ideal of Tahiti, but in reality, colonisation meant that Mataiea was no longer the ‘pure, primitive’ destination he had hoped for. Before his journey this ideal had been fuelled by, for example, Pierre Loti’s novel Le Mariage de Loti and his visits to the colonial pavilions at the 1889 World’s Fair. Once in Tahiti, and confronted with the consequences of European colonialism, he went to great lengths to learn more about the rich culture that had been lost. For instance, he used his contact with the island’s official interpreter, the half-Tahitian Monsieur Cadousteau, to learn as much as possible about the language and culture, and pored over the two volumes of Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan (1837) – travelogues by the ethnographer Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout – to discover Tahiti’s original religious customs (even though these, too, had already been much diluted by the early nineteenth century).
Gauguin used all of this to create nostalgic canvases, in which he relied heavily on his imagination in an attempt to capture his own fantasy of a ‘primitive’ Tahiti. In them, he depicted the Tahitian population in complete harmony with the natural world in which they lived. Except for the colonial missionary dresses in which he painted some of his female models, his compositions never referenced the French presence in Tahiti. Yet the melancholy that the colonial situation in Tahiti evoked in Gauguin seems to seep into the overall atmosphere of his paintings. Many Tahitian figures in his works are alone or unapproachable and lost in thought. They sit or stand aimlessly in the landscape. A passage from a letter Gauguin sent to his wife shortly after his arrival in Tahiti seems to touch upon this feeling: ‘The natives often move about at night, barefooted and silent. Nothing but this silence. I understand why these people can remain hours and days sitting immobile and gazing sadly at the sky. I apprehend all the things that are going to invade my being and feel most amazingly at peace at this moment.’
This melancholy is also palpable in Women on the Banks of the River, in which two squatting women at the riverbank stare blankly ahead, while a third stands somewhat aimlessly in the background. There is no interaction between the inert figures and little dedication to their tasks. Lost in thought, they seem to merge with a languid day during which time passes slowly. In the background rises the majestic mango tree, a silent witness to the drifting days. It is a glimpse of a tropical paradise, albeit a somewhat doleful one.
Style and technique
Gauguin combined the specific atmosphere of his Tahitian paintings with a rich and vibrant palette, an ingenious compositional play with depth and space and an unprecedentedly free use of abstracted forms. Almost every landscape that Gauguin painted during this period contains passages of colour and form that essentially lean towards pure decoration, whereby he broke away from representing observable reality. This is also evident in Women on the Banks of the River: the section of the composition intended to represent the river was painted as an imaginary play of forms, in which only the undulations slightly suggest the movement of water. Although this small painting is less ambitious than many of his other landscapes from the period – he did not give it a Tahitian title like many of the other works – it does possess the stylistic characteristics typical of Gauguin’s work from Tahiti.
Gauguin painted this small picture on burlap, a roll of which he had with him in Tahiti; other works from this period are also executed on this type of support. The coarse, open-weave structure of the burlap is visible along the edges of the stretcher and in the lower right corner, where a section of the paint layer has flaked off. The canvas has at some point been restretched on a newer frame, as shown by the paint layers which continue over the tacking edge on the left side. This must have been a later intervention. Furthermore, the coarse texture of the burlap can be seen through the paint layer in many places. Gauguin applied a ground of chalk and a starch made from breadfruit, which he presumably prepared himself. The source of the starch is an example of Gauguin’s career-long experimentation with unconventional materials, though he might have been forced to do so because no other material may have been available. He chose chalk, a calcareous component, because it absorbed much of the paint’s binder, lending the work a matt appearance; this had been standard in his studio practice for some time. The paint in Women on the Banks of the River is applied quite loosely and relatively opaquely for Gauguin; he worked less meticulously on this piece than on more ambitious and finely brushed paintings by him in the museum collection, such as The Mango Trees, Martinique or Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables). In certain passages, he worked wet-in-wet, such as in the right side of the mango tree, where brushstrokes blend together to suggest branches and foliage. This technique is also unusual in Gauguin’s more ambitious canvases. This small work has every appearance of a study; Gauguin also referred to it as an ‘étude’ when he sent it to Jo van Gogh-Bonger.
Reprise in a monotype
The time that Gauguin spent in France after his stay in Tahiti was brief: after 22 months, he set sail once again for French Polynesia. This period in France is regarded as one of versatile artistic exploration. It included extensive experimentation with woodcuts and monotypes, often returning to motifs from the work he had produced in Tahiti. As was his custom, Gauguin allowed his motifs to reappear across different media. In doing so, his objective was not to create neat reproductions of the same image, but to achieve manipulations and distortions of the scene through the unconventional use of materials and techniques, ensuring that each print was unique. This explains Gauguin’s interest in the monotype, a planographic technique where a flat plate marked with ink or paint is printed onto paper. This process yielded only a single print or a few differing versions. Instead of the usual ‘dark field’ method, where a copper plate is completely covered in ink and then worked with a clean brush, Gauguin often used a glass plate. On this, he painted a scene in watercolour, which he then printed himself onto damp sheets of paper. By adding some paint to the remaining image on the plate after the first impression, a few more prints could be obtained. He could also further enhance the print itself with various media.
Paul Gauguin, The Mango Tree, 1894, watercolour monotype, selectively heightened with water-based colour and white chalk, on paper, laid down on presentation mount, 26.4 × 17.7 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: © GrandPalaisRMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Tony Querrec
One of the Tahitian motifs Gauguin used for his monotypes was the mango tree from Women on the Banks of the River. It appears in three impressions titled The Mango Tree, all of which originated from the same glass plate. While their designs are virtually identical (though one of the three versions appears to have been trimmed), they differ greatly in their execution (, and ). The tree appears in reverse in the prints, meaning Gauguin painted it onto the glass plate exactly as it appears in the painting. This suggests that Gauguin had Women on the Banks of the River with him while painting the plate. The palm trees in the final print are not reversed relative to the painting. The rider in the image is reminiscent of Fatata te Mouà (), and the dog in the foreground closely resembles the one in the painting Arearea (1892, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In keeping with his imaginative and composite approach to creating images, Gauguin freely combined elements from various Tahitian works for this monotype.
The fact that Gauguin reused and reinterpreted the mango tree from Women on the Banks of the River in several works suggests that this rapidly painted study must have held a certain significance for him. It is likely, therefore, that he sent Jo van Gogh-Bonger a painting with which he was quite pleased, in thanks for safekeeping and returning the three Van Goghs he owned.
Joost van der Hoeven
August 2026