Vairumati

Vairumati is an oil on canvas painted by Paul Gauguin in 1897, during his second stay in Tahiti; measuring 73.5 × 92.5 cm, it is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The title comes from a Polynesian myth that Gauguin retold in his manuscript Ancien culte mahorie and in Noa Noa. Oro, son of the creator god Ta'aroa, wished to take a mortal wife and found a race superior to humankind. His sisters, the goddesses Haoaoa and Teuri, searched the islands for a woman worthy of him, and on Bora Bora, beside a lake, the god was charmed by the beautiful Vairumati. Each evening he came down to her from the sky on a rainbow. Their son founded the Arioi, a once powerful and revered society in Tahiti whose customs deeply shocked the first Europeans to reach the islands.

Gauguin shows Vairumati as a young Tahitian woman, bare to the waist, seated before an elaborately carved golden bed or throne set against a flat red ground. Behind her at the right sit two other women, and at the lower left a strange white bird with an orange beak grips a black lizard in its claws. The careful rendering of the carved wood and patterned cushion contrasts with the broad, simple brushwork of the vegetation behind. The same young woman and the white bird reappear in Gauguin's large canvas of the same period, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, where the bird stands near the old woman at the end of the cycle of life.

Both works were shown in Paris in 1898 at the exhibition Ambroise Vollard devoted to Gauguin, and Vairumati remained in Vollard's collection from that year. It later belonged to the Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata and came to France in 1959 under the peace treaty with Japan, hanging at the Jeu de Paume until it moved to the Orsay in 1986. It is signed and inscribed 'Vairumati 97 P. Gauguin' at lower left, and was restored in 2017 for the Grand Palais exhibition Gauguin the Alchemist.