The wife of the king

Despite the countless paintings of exotic subjects, the relationship of Paul Gauguin from Tahiti was very difficult. They can be compared, perhaps, with tender and reverent feelings for the girl who fell in love in childhood and half of my life dreamed of endless happiness with her. Similarly, the artist's cherished dream about your island Paradise. In the end, he came here in 1891, disillusioned, after some time escaped, but then returned to stay here until the end of his life, preferring to actually live more in their fantasies about Tahiti. And was in this relationship, of course, a powerful erotic component, the center of which was not so much the Tahitian women, but in the atmosphere of the island as a whole. And the most complete embodiment of that eroticism can be called a picture "King's wife".

In his works, Gauguin was eager as accurately as possible to portray the richness of Tahitian nature, local culture and rituals. On the other hand, with all his usual imagination very freely alter the surrounding reality, trying to "adjust" it to fit his vision of a primitive culture, thereby only reinforcing the stereotypes and myths about the Tahitians.

In reality at that time to see Tahiti girl like the heroine of the paintings, "king's Wife" was virtually impossible. Nevertheless, thanks to the skill of Gauguin, it seems an integral part of the fertile nature as beautiful and seductive. She without hesitation stretched on the grass, covered only by a piece of white cloth, surrounded by ripe mango. It is interesting that the artist chose for the girls pose, typical of traditional European depictions of nymphs, odalisques, and numerous Wehner (since at least the XVI century 1,2, 3). So Gauguin used the usual erotic way, filling it with new and exotic sensuality.

Author: Eugene Sidelnikov