Barbarous Tales
Artwork by Paul Gauguin • 1902
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About this artwork - painting analysis
Painted during Paul Gauguin's second stay in Polynesia, Savage Tales immerses the viewer in a mysterious and symbolic universe where fascination with Oceanian cultures intertwines with spiritual inquiry. This masterful canvas, completed in 1902 just months before the artist's death in the Marquesas Islands, brings together three enigmatic figures in a lush landscape imbued with serenity and strangeness. At the center, two young Tahitian women with copper-toned complexions sit dressed in traditional pareos, while to the left, an ambiguous figure with a reddish face and flaming hair – sometimes identified as Gauguin's companion, Dutch painter Meyer de Haan – observes the scene with a piercing gaze. This intrusive Western presence contrasts with the tranquility of the two Polynesian women, creating a narrative tension reinforced by suspended pink flowers and scattered floral motifs.
The chromatic palette reveals the postimpressionist painter's mastery in using saturated and non-naturalistic colors. The deep greens of tropical vegetation dialogue with atmospheric blues and ochre tones of the bodies, while touches of pink and orange delicately illuminate the whole. Gauguin applies paint in broad flat areas, characteristic of the cloisonnism and synthetism he developed in Brittany before his departure for the South Seas. This technique simplifies forms while preserving remarkable expressive intensity.
Housed in the Museum Folkwang in Essen, this painting testifies to Gauguin's relentless quest to escape Western civilization, which he deemed corrupt. The very title evokes the mythological narratives and oral traditions of Oceanian peoples, those "tales" the artist sought to capture before their disappearance. The work thus embodies a synthesis between primitivism and symbolism, offering a romanticized and personal vision of a lost paradise that continues to question our relationship with otherness and cultural authenticity.
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Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
