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Your galleryMahana no atua (Day of the God)
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Follow the colored shapes through the foreground water, then compare their curves with the reclining bodies above them. Which shapes appear to echo one another?
Gauguin painted this scene in Paris in 1894 after returning from his first Tahitian stay. It combines memory and invention, rather than documenting a ceremony he witnessed. An idol and repeated groups of figures rise above water broken into broad, interlocking colors. Those invented arrangements turn the setting into a symbolic composition.
Oil on linen canvas · 68 × 91 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Post-Impressionism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Mahana no atua (Day of the God)
- Artist
- Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
- Date
- 1894
- Medium
- Oil on linen canvas
- Dimensions
- 68 × 91 cm (26 7/8 × 36 in.); Framed: 87.7 × 110.5 × 6.4 cm (34 1/2 × 43 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.)
- Credit line
- Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.