Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

Gauguin painted Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) in 1891, during his first months in Tahiti. He had left Paris in April of that year, sailing to Papeete on a French naval ship. He was 43 years old, had abandoned his wife and five children, and had quit his job as a stockbroker to become a full-time painter. He arrived in Tahiti expecting to find a primitive paradise untouched by European civilization. What he found was a French colony where the native culture had been devastated by disease, missionary activity, and colonial policy. The painting shows a Tahitian Madonna and Child. A woman in a blue dress stands at the left, holding a child on her shoulder. Behind her, two female figures in traditional Tahitian dress stand in a landscape of red earth and green trees. A yellow angel with red wings hovers at the upper left, gesturing toward the woman and child. The composition is based on a bas-relief from the Javanese temple of Borobudur that Gauguin had seen at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, which he adapted into a Tahitian scene. The title, Ia Orana Maria, is the Tahitian translation of 'Hail Mary,' the opening of the Catholic prayer. Gauguin was not religious in any conventional sense, but he was interested in the way that Christian iconography could be transplanted into a non-European setting. The painting merges the Madonna and Child with the Tahitian landscape, creating a hybrid image that is neither European nor Polynesian but something that exists only in paint. Gauguin had been preparing for this trip for years. He had lived in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he developed the style of painting with flat areas of bold color outlined in dark lines, which he called Synthetism. He had spent time with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, a collaboration that ended with Van Gogh's ear incident. He had exhibited at the Cafe Volpini in 1889, to little attention. By 1891, he had exhausted his options in France and needed somewhere else to go. Tahiti was his gamble. Oil on canvas, 113 by 87 centimeters. Gauguin painted in flat, unmodulated colors: the red earth, the green trees, the blue dress, the yellow angel. There are no shadows, no atmospheric effects, no traditional modeling. The surface is smooth and matte, with the colors applied in thin, even layers. The dark outlines around the figures give the painting the quality of a stained glass window or a medieval fresco. The vertical format and bold colors make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or any room with white walls. The reds, greens, and yellows pair with natural wood and simple, modern furniture. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the colors room to read. The painting has an exotic, dreamlike quality that suits rooms with a bold design. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1951, bequeathed by Sam A. Lewisohn, the same collector whose bequest brought Rousseau's Repast of the Lion to the museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.