There is no Tahiti in this painting. Gauguin made it in a Paris studio in 1894, between his two Pacific trips, from memory and invention — and the god standing in the middle of it was never worshipped by anyone. Edgar Degas bought it off the studio wall that December.
The top floor on the rue Vercingétorix
Gauguin came back from the Pacific in 1893 with a body of work nobody wanted to buy, and took the top floor of a building at 6 rue Vercingétorix in Montparnasse. He lived there from January 1894 until July 1895.
In May 1894 he went to Brittany with a young woman known as Annah the Javanese and a pet monkey. On 25 May, in Concarneau, a group of sailors began throwing stones at Annah; the fight that followed left Gauguin beaten and his leg fractured. It never healed properly and it troubled him for the rest of his life.
Annah went back to Paris ahead of him, let herself into the studio and took everything of value in it. She left the paintings.
A god out of a Javanese temple
The figure presiding over the scene looks like a Polynesian idol and is not one. It came from photographs of the carved reliefs at Borobudur, the Buddhist temple complex in Java, which Gauguin used for figures all through his Tahitian pictures.
That substitution was not laziness. By the time he landed, the old Tahitian religion had been suppressed by missionaries for the best part of a century, and the gods he had sailed halfway round the world to paint were largely gone. So he built one out of a photograph of a Buddhist temple, and gave the painting a Tahitian title: Mahana no atua, day of the god.
Then look at the bottom third of the canvas. The pool the bather stands in is not water. It is flat zones of pink, orange, green and blue locked together like cut paper, and the Art Institute calls it one of the most abstract things he ever did.
Five hundred francs, and lot 43
In December 1894 Gauguin hung his own work in his own flat and invited people up. Degas climbed the stairs and bought this painting for 500 francs, entering it in his private inventory as number 71. He was sixty, established, and buying from a painter who could not sell.
It did not save him. A public auction of his work in February 1895 went badly; he sailed for Tahiti in July and never came back to Europe. He died in the Marquesas in 1903.
Degas kept the picture until he died in 1917. When his collection was broken up at the Galerie Georges Petit on 26 and 27 March 1918, this canvas was lot 43 and it made 12,600 francs — twenty-five times what he had paid — under a title that had it wrong: Rest by the Sea, Tahiti.
Degas bought it off the wall of a flat and kept it for twenty-three years. It has been on somebody's wall ever since.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.