Tahitians Fishing

Tahitians Fishing by Paul Gauguin French, 1848-1903, is a complex drawing created between 1891 and 1893, early in the artist’s first critical sojourn to the South Pacific. Classified as a drawing due to its primary reliance on ink and brushwork, this work demonstrates Gauguin’s highly experimental approach to media during this period. The artist utilized brush and black ink layered over an underdrawing of brush and brown ink, which modern analysis suggests may have originally contained a purplish pigment that has subsequently faded. He further enhanced the composition using watercolor and opaque gouache on parchment, a technique emphasizing luminosity and surface texture before the finished sheet was laid down on a stabilizing brown wove paper.

This piece reflects Gauguin's definitive shift away from the European art world of France towards a style rooted in Primitivism and Symbolism, where he idealized the life of indigenous islanders. The subject, depicting Tahitian figures engaged in traditional fishing activities, aligns with the artist’s broader quest to capture a perceived unspoiled existence free from Western industrialization. The composition features the flattened perspective and decorative linearity characteristic of his mature output.

While many of Gauguin’s iconic oil paintings from this era are widely disseminated through high-quality prints and are often cited within the public domain, works like this drawing provide crucial insight into the fluid draftsmanship and evolving color sensibility of the Post-Impressionist master. This important example of Gauguin’s non-oil technique, executed just before he firmly established his iconic Tahitian style, is housed in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.