Paul Gauguin Women and a White Horse

The painting in your uploaded image is Women and a White Horse by Paul Gauguin, painted in 1903.

Key facts

• Artist: Paul Gauguin, French, 1848–1903
• Title: Women and a White Horse
• Date: 1903
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Original size: 73.3 × 91.7 cm, or approximately 28⅞ × 36⅛ inches
• Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Accession number: 48.547
• Current display status: The original is listed as not currently on view
• Signature: “P. Gauguin 1903,” at lower right

The authoritative museum record is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston collection page.

Where and when it was painted

Gauguin completed the work in 1903 on Hiva Oa, one of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. He had moved there in 1901 and spent the final years of his life in the settlement of Atuona. The painting was made shortly before his death in May 1903.

It is therefore a very late Gauguin work, created during a period when he was seriously ill and increasingly preoccupied with spirituality, death, and the meaning of the tropical environment around him.

What is shown

The composition includes:

• Three women moving or standing in a lush landscape
• A pale or white horse with a rider
• Dense tropical vegetation in intense greens, oranges, reds, blues, and ochres
• A stream or watery foreground passage
• A small cross on the distant hillside
• A mountainous background compressed behind the figures

The scene is not painted as a straightforward naturalistic landscape. Gauguin arranged the figures, vegetation, and colors almost like a decorative frieze. The flattened depth and strong color divisions make the image feel symbolic and dreamlike rather than documentary.

Meaning of the white horse

The Museum of Fine Arts notes that white horses in Gauguin’s work can be associated with death or transcendence. In this painting, the horse is also the strongest pale form against the saturated tropical colors, making it a visual and symbolic focus.

The horse may suggest several overlapping ideas:

• A transition between life and death
• Spiritual or religious symbolism
• A mythical presence within the landscape
• A contrast between the ordinary human figures and a more allegorical world

The painting does not provide one definitive explanation, so the horse’s meaning remains deliberately open.

The cross and Gauguin’s burial place

The small cross on the hill is particularly significant. According to the MFA, it refers to the cemetery above Atuona, where Gauguin himself was buried shortly after completing the painting.

That detail gives the landscape a strong autobiographical and mortality-related dimension. The work can be understood partly as a late meditation on:

• The place where Gauguin had chosen to live
• Christian missionary influence in Polynesia
• His own approaching death
• The tension between earthly life and spiritual transcendence

The cross also complicates the image historically. Gauguin often presented Polynesia through an idealized, personal mythology, but the islands were living within a French colonial and missionary system. The painting is therefore not simply an untouched view of “paradise.” It reflects both the landscape itself and a European artist’s constructed interpretation of it.

Style and visual analysis

Several features are characteristic of Gauguin’s later work:

1. Flattened space
   The background, figures, and vegetation are compressed into broad bands rather than arranged through conventional Renaissance perspective.
2. Unnatural, expressive color
   The red-orange foliage, turquoise and deep blue passages, yellow earth, and emerald vegetation are emotionally and symbolically chosen rather than strictly observed.
3. Decorative patterning
   The plants and flowers form large rhythmic areas of color. The landscape behaves almost like textile or tapestry design.
4. Simplified figures
   The women are not individualized through detailed portraiture. They function as part of the overall symbolic arrangement.
5. A tension between everyday life and allegory
   The scene appears calm and ordinary, yet the horse, cross, and heightened colors give it a solemn, almost visionary quality.

Provenance

The museum records the following ownership history:

• Gustave Fayet, Igny, France
• 1906: Acquired by Carl Moll in Vienna
• October 31, 1908: Sold to Bernheim-Jeune et Fils in Paris
• September 14, 1909: Sold to Ambroise Vollard
• 1929: Paul Rosenberg and Co., Paris/New York
• October 24, 1929: Sold to John Taylor Spaulding in Boston
• 1948: Bequeathed by Spaulding to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston