Merahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents or The Ancestors of Tehamana)
Paul Gauguin, 1893
In this portrait, Gauguin depicts the 13-year-old Tahitian girl Tehamana in a missionary dress holding a Samoan fan. A ripe mango 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 foreignness, transforming Tehamana into the embodiment of his own imagination.
| Artist | Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) |
|---|---|
| Medium | Oil on jute canvas |
| Size | 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.) |
| Origin | France |
| Type | Painting |
| Museum | Art Institute of Chicago · museum page |
| Rights | Public domain (CC0): free to download, print and hang. |
The original is 21 × 30 in. Will it fit your wall? →
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Image, title, dates, medium and the note are the Art Institute of Chicago's own records, released under CC0; nothing on this page is written by us beyond the links.