Mata Mua (In Olden Times)

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Painted in December 1892 during Gauguin's first sojourn in Tahiti, Mata Mua (In Olden Times) depicts an imagined scene of indigenous Polynesian life in which a group of women worship Hina, the Maori goddess of the moon. In the foreground two women sit beneath a towering tree — one playing the flute, the other listening — while a second group dances around a stone idol in the middle ground, all set against a landscape of interlocking flat planes of color bounded by pink and purple mountains. Executed in oil on canvas with bold, non-naturalistic color and flattened forms characteristic of Post-Impressionism, the work draws as much on Gauguin's own mythologized vision of Polynesia as on any observed reality. The painting is widely regarded as one of the defining works of Gauguin's Tahitian period, embodying his ambition to recover — through art — an imagined pre-colonial golden age.