Merahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents or The Ancestors of Tehamana)
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
1893
- Medium
- Oil on jute canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- 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.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deering McCormick
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In this portrait, the 13-year-old Tahitian girl named Tehamana appears stoic, shoulders squared and gaze unflinching. She wears a missionary dress and wields a Samoan fan as white flowers tumble from her hair. The ripe mango beside her alludes to fertility. In the background, Gauguin combined various non-European emblems—glyphs derived from an Easter Island tablet and a female deity inspired by Polynesian and Hindu sources—to build a generic sense of foreigness and mystery, transforming Tehamana into the embodiment of his own desire.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
