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ArtistAn alternate, more enlightened universe in late-19th-century Polynesia: Paul Gauguin has arrived healthy, respectful, and entirely free of the colonial appetite for exploiting or romanticizing the people around him. Instead of pursuing an imagined “exotic paradise,” he misses his fellow artists back in Europe and spends long afternoons writing them enormous affectionate letters describing the sea, the weather, his adventures, the strange colors of sunset, and how much he wishes they were there. The reversal is comic: Gauguin has become the model rather than the painter. A lively collective of adult Polynesian women artists has hired him to pose in their open-air tropical studio beside the beach. They are serious realist painters who have somehow been reading enormous quantities of Gabriel García Márquez, so their realism continually slips into magical realism. Canvases, brushes, pigments, fruit, flowers, books, shells, unfinished paintings and handwritten letters cover wooden tables beneath palm trees. The women laugh and debate composition while Gauguin obediently attempts increasingly ridiculous poses. In the central scene, they have painted Gauguin as an impossible DOG–RABBIT HYBRID: his recognizable bearded human face merging naturally into a peculiar creature with long rabbit ears, a shaggy doglike body, enormous paws, alert eyes and an expression of philosophical confusion. Gauguin sees the portrait and bursts out laughing while the painters laugh with him. Around them, other unfinished canvases transform distant European civilization into equally bizarre hybrid animals—absurd zoological metaphors for the strange world beyond their island. The tropical paradise, meanwhile, is rendered as completely ordinary to the people who live there: working studios, friendships, meals, ocean light, painting, conversation and daily life. Warm humid afternoon, turquoise sea, dense tropical vegetation, weathered wooden architecture, luminous pigments, dreamlike shadows, playful visual intelligence, affectionate satire, magical realism, richly layered painterly surfaces, late-19th-century atmosphere mixed with subtle surrealism, sophisticated composition, expressive faces, strange but believable animal anatomy, humor without caricaturing Polynesian people. No text, no captions, no lettering, no modern objects.
In the more reasonable universe, Paul Gauguin arrived on the island without syphilis, without a wife waiting invisibly across the ocean, and without that European disease of believing everything beautiful had been placed on earth for him to possess.
This surprised everybody, especially Gauguin.
He had come prepared to become a great painter and discovered, within three weeks, that the island already had seven.
They were women who painted beneath a palm-thatched roof overlooking the sea. They had somehow acquired a trunk containing seventeen novels by Gabriel García Márquez, although García Márquez would not be born for another thirty years. Nobody considered this remarkable. Books frequently arrived before their authors in those days.
The women read them aloud while painting.
Consequently, their realism became troublesome.
A fish painted on Tuesday might develop a human conscience by Friday. A portrait of a colonial administrator acquired antlers. A banker became a turtle. One particularly disagreeable missionary slowly turned into a chicken, although the women insisted they had painted exactly what they saw.
Gauguin adored them.
Instead of painting the women, he became their model.
Every morning they arranged him differently. They made him crouch beneath breadfruit trees, balance coconuts on his shoulders, imitate sleeping dogs, and once remain motionless for four hours while holding a pineapple as though receiving news of a death.
He laughed so much he was nearly useless.
Meanwhile he wrote enormous letters home to his artist friends.
You fools, he wrote. You should see the light here.
Then he would describe the sea for twelve pages, complain about mosquitoes for six, and finish by admitting that he missed arguing about painting in cold cafés more than he had believed possible.
One afternoon the women unveiled his portrait.
Gauguin stared.
They had given him rabbit ears, the paws of an enormous dog, the melancholy body of some creature that had wandered out of creation before God had finished naming things, and his own astonished human face.
Behind him stood a perfectly ordinary island.
“What am I?” Gauguin asked.
The painters collapsed laughing.
Finally the oldest woman wiped her eyes.
“That,” she said, “is how the rest of the world looks from here.”
Gauguin considered this for a long time.
Then he began laughing too.
Years afterward, European museums argued over what the mysterious dog-rabbit represented. Civilization. Desire. Exile. Colonial guilt. The divided self.
They were all wrong.
It represented Paul Gauguin sitting very still on a hot afternoon while six women tried to decide whether his ears were long enough.
And in that more enlightened universe, this became his most famous portrait.
