Design for a Fan Featuring a Landscape and a Statue of the Goddess Hina

Paul Gauguin · 1900/03

Medium

Watercolor and gouache, with touches of pen and black ink, over traces of graphite, on cream Japanese paper (pieced), laid down on cream wove paper

Original size

Primary and secondary supports: 20.8 × 41.7 cm (8 1/4 × 16 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

This fan design captures the dreamlike synthesis of Polynesian mythology and decorative art that defined Gauguin's later years, centring the goddess Hina against an idyllic tropical landscape rendered in soft, luminous colour. By the time Gauguin created this work around 1900–1903, he had settled in the Marquesas Islands, increasingly absorbed by indigenous spiritual traditions. Hina, the Polynesian moon goddess, recurs throughout his late work as a symbol of the feminine divine, and the fan format — borrowed from the Japanese prints that had shaped an entire generation of Post-Impressionist artists — gave him a decorative vehicle perfectly suited to the curved, ceremonial quality of the image. The combination of watercolour, gouache, and ink on Japanese paper produces a surface that feels simultaneously intimate and otherworldly. Gauguin made a number of fan designs during his Polynesian years, using the format to bridge fine art and applied craft in a way that challenged the hierarchy between the two. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this delicate work into a medium with its own presence — capturing the warm ochres, soft greens, and sculptural stillness of the original while giving the image the depth and texture that only oil on canvas can provide.