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Your galleryMerahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents or The Ancestors of Tehamana)
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Compare the dress’s blue-and-white stripes with the fan’s delicate pattern, then look at how differently the background figure and signs are painted.
Gauguin painted Tehamana in 1893; his partly fictional account says she was thirteen when they met. Her missionary-style dress and Samoan fan appear beside symbols drawn from Rapa Nui tablets and from Polynesian and Hindu imagery. These references express Gauguin’s construction of Tahiti, rather than a reliable account of the sitter’s beliefs or ancestry.
Oil on jute canvas · 75 × 53 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Post-Impressionism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Merahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents or The Ancestors of Tehamana)
- Artist
- Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
- Date
- 1893
- Medium
- Oil on jute canvas
- Dimensions
- 75 × 53 cm (29 1/2 × 20 7/8 in.); Framed: 98.8 × 76.6 × 8.3 cm (38 7/8 × 30 1/8 × 3 1/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deering McCormick
- 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.