Gauguin’s Tahiti

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 21

Gauguin’s Tahiti

CSpeciaily written for “The Press" by KENNETH ANTHONY)

himself, could have imagined that 60 years later his art would be reproduced on the island's stamps. But this was no ordinary beachcomber; he was Paul Gauguin, the French painter regarded as one of the first post-impressionists. To anyone .who has ever felt the wish to “get away from it all,” there has always been a special appeal about his story—of how he left fame and family behind in Paris to seek an idyllic existence with the natives in the South Seas. Unfortunately, it proved less idyllic than Gauguin had imagined—and less idyllic than some of his paintings suggest. By 1891, when he arrived in Tahiti for the first time, the onset of Western civilisation was already affecting the primitive native culture he had come so far to study. But he was inspired by the great beauty of the island landscape and on his canvases preserved his impressions of the scenes and characters of life in Tahiti that appealed to him most. One of his most famous paintings is “Tahitians on the Beach;" and this is shown on the large and brightly coloured stamp illustrated here. On another value of the same series is Gauguin’s “The ! White Horse.” Tahiti, a French colony since 1880, is the most im-l portant of the French Islands in the Pacific, formerly known as Oceanic Settlements and now as French Polynesia.. The stamp is from the first set to appear with the new name, issued in 1958. It ranks as one of the . most interesting examples of “art in miniature” to be found in the stamp album.