Te faruru (Here We Make Love), from the Noa Noa Suite

Paul Gauguin · 1893/94

Medium

Wood-block print, printed twice in golden-brown and black inks, with selective wiping of the black ink, over a selectively inked yellow tone block, and transferred deep-yellow, red, and orange oil-based media, some containing beeswax and conifer resin (probably pine resin), with hand-applied dark yellow and brown gouache, on cream Japanese paper (previously mounted on mottled blue wove paper laid down on cream wove card [a presentation mount])

Original size

Image/sheet: 35.7 × 20.5 cm (14 1/16 × 8 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Te faruru — meaning "Here We Make Love" — is one of Gauguin's most sensuously layered prints, its interlocked figures dissolving into a richly textured field of golden ochre, deep brown, and shadow. Gauguin created the Noa Noa Suite in Paris between 1893 and 1894, shortly after his first voyage to Tahiti, working from the woodblocks he had carved there to accompany his autobiographical manuscript of the same name. What makes these prints exceptional is their radical process: each sheet was run through the block multiple times in different inks, then enriched by hand with oil-based media containing beeswax and pine resin, and finished with gouache — making every impression effectively a unique painting in its own right. The result sits somewhere between printmaking, drawing, and painting, resisting easy categorisation in a way that felt entirely deliberate. The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the finest surviving impressions, preserving the warm, almost smouldering palette Gauguin achieved through this painstaking layering. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates that layered warmth into paint on canvas, capturing the dense interplay of golden and dark tones that gives the original its charged, dreamlike atmosphere — faithful to the spirit of a work that was always, at heart, made by hand.