Color as Feeling

Paul Gauguin

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

1891

Oil on canvas, 113.7 × 87.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A mother carries a child on her shoulder while two women in wrapped cloths approach through a garden. It was the first important canvas he made in Tahiti, ahead of his series on Polynesian beliefs.

• Mary and the Christ Child appear as Tahitian figures. The scene recasts a familiar Christian subject with a Polynesian setting and cast.
• In a March 1892 letter, he said he was fairly pleased with it.
• Look for the angel with yellow wings, half hidden among the flowers at left.
• The title is painted in Tahitian at lower left, like a caption.
• Sam A. Lewisohn bequeathed it to the Met in 1951.

The title puts the angel's greeting to Mary into Tahitian. Much of the design comes from a photograph he owned of a relief at Borobudur, a temple in Java.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0