Tahitian Women on the Beach

Tahitian Women on the Beach is an 1891 oil on canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, held in the Musée d Orsay in Paris. It shows two Tahitian women seated at rest, one dressed in traditional local clothing and the other in a missionary style garment that reflects the French colonial presence on the islands. Painted during Gauguin first stay in Tahiti between 1891 and 1893, the work is a key example of his symbolist and synthetist style and his stated wish to find ecstasy, calm and art away from European materialism. Gauguin renders the women deep skin tone and solid physiques in a way that gives them an almost sculptural presence, deliberately at odds with conventional European ideas of beauty.