Conversation

Conversation (Les Parau Parau), also known as Gossip or Words, Words, is an oil on canvas painted by Paul Gauguin in Tahiti in 1891, during his first stay on the island; measuring 70.5 × 90.3 cm, it is in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Gauguin sailed for Tahiti in 1891 hoping to find an unspoilt paradise, but found that European civilisation had already changed life in Papeete, so he settled in the village of Mataiea, about 40 km away. This canvas was the first of several on the theme of women talking together; later treatments include Taperaa mahana (Early Evening), also in the Hermitage, and Parau Parau (Whispered Words) at the Yale University Art Gallery, both of 1892. Only in the Hermitage Conversation do the figures fill the foreground. Two of the women correspond to studies in a watercolour of Tahitian female types on a sheet of Gauguin's Noa Noa manuscript in the Louvre.

Six women sit in a loose circle on the ground, absorbed in quiet talk. Gauguin himself chose the Tahitian title, which means 'words, words' or conversation, and in a letter to his wife Mette of 8 December 1892 he insisted that exhibition catalogues should keep the titles as written on the pictures, because the language was strange and carried several meanings. The Hermitage curator Albert Kostenevich has described the picture as more unified than Taperaa mahana, with outlines that echo one another like the rods of a basket and a horizon set so high that the ground almost merges with the picture plane. The title, signature and date 'Les Parau Parau — PGauguin 91' appear at lower left.

In 1895 the canvas was in the keeping of Gauguin's friend, the dealer Georges Chaudet; after Chaudet's death in 1899 it passed through Ambroise Vollard and Durand-Ruel and a Paris private collection. On 4 May 1907 the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov bought it, together with Landscape with Peacocks, for 15,000 francs. Nationalised after the Revolution, it hung in the State Museum of New Western Art from 1923 and was transferred to the Hermitage in 1948.