#79 Mahana no atua — Coaster

He painted it in Paris, not Tahiti. Gauguin had come home after two years in the Pacific, was living in a studio hung with his own souvenirs, and composed this from memory and imagination — the idol in the middle is not any god the Tahitians actually worshipped, but a figure he invented from a photograph of a Javanese temple. The pool of colour at the bottom is nearly abstract. Art Institute of Chicago.