The two women at the left have their hands pressed together in prayer, and the pose is not Tahitian and not Christian. Gauguin took it from monks greeting the Buddha, carved in stone on the temple of Borobudur in Java, which he knew from photographs he carried with him.
What he said it was
In March 1892 he wrote to his friend Daniel de Monfreid and described the picture flatly, the way one painter tells another. He had made a size 50 canvas — a stock French stretcher format — and on it, an angel with yellow wings points out Mary and Jesus, both Tahitian, to two Tahitian women, nudes wrapped in pareus.
Read that again and the thing it is usually called falls apart. In an Annunciation the angel brings the news to Mary. Here the angel is showing Mary to somebody else, and the two women are the ones being told. The title is Tahitian for Hail Mary, which is the greeting, not the message.
Mother and child both have haloes, and the child rides on his mother's shoulder. In front of them there is fruit laid out on a cloth. The angel is at the left in the background, in lavender, mostly behind a flowering tree.
The temple in the photographs
Borobudur is a ninth-century Buddhist monument in central Java, miles of carved relief wrapped around a stepped stone hill. Gauguin never went. He owned photographs of the reliefs and used them the way other painters used plaster casts, which is how a Buddhist gesture ends up on two women in Tahiti in front of a Christian mother and child.
The borrowing shows in the drawing, too. The women stand stiffly, side on, in a shallow band across the canvas, more like a carved frieze than like people in a field. Everything else in the picture is soft and deep and full of leaves.
He had gone to the Pacific in 1891 to find a subject that was not Europe. What he sent home was a Christian scene, in Tahitian dress, posed off a photograph of a temple in Indonesia.
Paris, November 1893
He came back and put on a show at Durand-Ruel in Paris: forty-one paintings, chosen by him. Ia Orana Maria is the first entry in the catalogue, which is the nearest thing to a painter saying out loud which one he thinks is the best.
It sold for two thousand francs. That was more than he had been paid for any painting in his life, and it is worth sitting with: the picture that paid him best was the one with the most borrowed in it.
He went back to the Pacific in 1895 and stayed. The canvas stayed in Paris, passed through collections there, and reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1951 — a Tahitian Madonna, with a Javanese prayer in it, hanging in Manhattan.
Two thousand francs in Paris, more than he had ever been paid. The hands came from Java, and the picture comes to your table.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.