Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings celebrate the lushness and mysterious splendour of his new environment. At the same time they are seldom correct pictures of Tahitian life, from an anthropological standpoint, but rather feature recastings and recombinations of objects and persons taken out of their normal settings, as was the case with several of his paintings done in Brittany.

The most important paintings executed during Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti are the Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) and The Spectre Watches over Her (Manao Tupapau). In Ia Orana Maria Gauguin places the Christian story into a setting where both the figures and the vegetation are Polynesian. A Tahitian woman, her young son, and two women standing nearby are shown in the obvious attitudes of the Virgin and Child with attendant saints or worshiping angels.

Once again Gauguin has returned to the theme of the effect of profound religious faith on an apparently simple people, which had preoccupied him in some of his most important Breton works. The apparently effortless fusion of Christian iconography with Tahitian subject matter is in fact carefully contrived, with the poses of the background figures lifted from the relief carving on the Javanese temple of Borobudur, photographs of which Gauguin had taken with him to Tahiti.