Manao tupapau (She Thinks of the Ghost or The Ghost Thinks of Her), from the Noa Noa Suite

Paul Gauguin · 1893/94

Medium

Wood-block print, printed three times in reddish-brown, black, and light black ink, with touches of brush and black gouache and silver-gray watercolor (altered from black), on ivory laid Japanese paper, laid down on ivory wove Japanese paper (a laminate made by the artist)

Original size

Image: 20.4 × 35.7 cm (8 1/16 × 14 1/16 in.); Sheet: 20.7 × 35.9 cm (8 3/16 × 14 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Manao tupapau holds a quiet, unsettling power — a young woman lies face-down on a bed, her body tense, while a shadowy spirit looms behind her in the dark. Gauguin based this print on one of his most celebrated Tahitian oil paintings, created two years earlier during his first stay in Polynesia. For the Noa Noa Suite, he translated that image into woodblock form, printing the same block multiple times in reddish-brown, black, and a softer grey-black, then adding touches of gouache and watercolor by hand — making each impression subtly unique. The deliberately rough, gouged lines reject European refinement in favour of something rawer, closer to the carved surfaces he admired in Polynesian and Japanese art. The Noa Noa Suite was conceived as a visual companion to Gauguin's autobiographical journal of the same name, written to explain Tahitian life and mythology to a Parisian audience largely baffled by his work. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the print's layered atmosphere — its deep shadow, the luminous warmth of the woman's skin, the ghostly presence at the edge of the composition — onto canvas with the texture and depth that only oil paint can give.