Contes barbares

In what his perhaps his loveliest and most mysterious painting, Contes Barbares from 1902, she gazes at us once again: we recognize her in the figure kneeing in the foreground with the red-orange luminous hair. The figure on the left edge of the picture is a portrait of a young man who had already served as model for Gauguin's Marquisian à la cape rouge (Musée des Beaux Arts, Liege). Past and present meet in this painting imbued with the painter's clearly discernable death wish. 13 years later Gauguin re-used this diabolic-looking image of his friend in the middle of a South Sea landscape.