A painting of two Tahitian women by French artist Paul Gauguin, who died penniless in 1903, has reportedly smashed the record books as the most costly ever sold. The piece, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), is selling at $300m (£200m).
The oil-on-canvas was created in 1892 during Gauguin’s first visit to French Polynesia. The painting was sold by Swiss collector Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby’s manager. Although Staechelin has declined to name the buyer or the price, it is supposed to have been purchased by the state-financed Qatar Museums and to have topped the earlier record, also set by Qatar, which really bought Cezanne’s The Card Players in 2011 for $259 million.
Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist, visited Tahiti twice.
“He portrayed the nation as living only to sing and to make love,” Nancy Mowll Mathews, the author of Paul Gauguin, An Erotic Life, told the Guardian in a 2001 conference. “That’s how he got the money from his friends and raised the public’s attentiveness in his adventure. But, of course, he knew the fact, which was that Tahiti was an normal island with an international, westernized community.”
Gauguin’s efforts failed and on his come back to France two years later, “what should have been a triumphant come back turned into a morass of misunderstanding and disappointment as his paintings remained unsold,” the newspaper says.
Within a few years, Gauguin returned to French Polynesia, where he finally died of a morphine overdose.
“Gauguin seems to have fallen for the legend of Tahiti he created,” Mathews told the Guardian in 2001.
“He returned expecting the erotic idyll that was only yet a figment of his mind. Of course, he didn’t find it and the regret was profound: he died a perverted and bitter man, having estranged everyone both at home and in Tahiti. It’s a sad story of a man who believed his own fiction,” the author said.
