The Man Who Sailed Away

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You see what he was after in one of his first major Tahitian canvases, Manao Tupapau, also called The Spirit of the Dead Watches. The girl lying uneasily on the yellow bedding is his 14-year-old mistress Tehamana. Gauguin had returned home one night to find her stretched on their bed in terror of the darkness, which Tahitians believed was populated by spirits. The seated figure brooding at left is one of them. Over the bed are the starbursts of imaginary flowers that Gauguin contrived to suggest the nighttime phosphorescence that the islanders believed was the visible sign of those spirits.

The girl's pose is an inversion of the reclining European nude — Manet's Olympia flipped. She lies at an improbable angle across the bedding, but the very awkwardness of her position gives her weight within the picture, and by extension, the world. Even when, in The Ancestors of Tehamana, he painted the same girl more conventionally, in an upright and frontal pose and a modest Western dress, he placed her before a stylized background of native spirits and glyphic letters borrowed from the Rongorongo tablets of Easter Island. Those tablets have never been fully decoded. Neither has Gauguin. But the power of his mysteries brings us back to him over and over.