Aha oe feii? (What! Are You Jealous?)

Paul Gauguin · 1894

Medium

Watercolor monotype from a glass matrix, with brush and white gouache, reddish-brown and black water color, on cream wove paper (an imitation Japanese vellum)

Original size

19.5 × 23.2 cm (7 11/16 × 9 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Two Tahitian women recline by the sea in a composition of languid intimacy, their forms rendered in warm ochres, reddish-browns, and whites that seem to shimmer against the paper's cream surface. Gauguin made this work in 1894, during a return visit to France between his two Tahitian periods, working from memory and sketches he had brought back with him. The monotype technique — painting directly onto a glass matrix, then pressing paper against it — produces an image with a distinctive blurred softness, somewhere between a drawing and a print, that no conventional medium quite replicates. That quality of dreamed recollection suits the subject perfectly: this is Tahiti as Gauguin had internalised it, not observed it. The title comes from a line in Noa Noa, Gauguin's own account of his first Polynesian stay, where he describes overhearing two women speaking these words to each other — a moment of unguarded feeling that clearly lodged in his imagination. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's warm palette and fluid contours into a medium that carries its own depth and texture, bringing this quietly charged image into your home as a lasting work rather than a print.