Art Institute of Chicago
Merahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents or The Ancestors of Tehamana)
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
- Date
- 1893
- Medium
- Oil on jute canvas
- Culture
- France
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Institution
- Art Institute of Chicago
In this portrait, the 13-year-old Tahitian girl named Tehamana appears stoic, shoulders squared and gaze unflinching. She wears a missionary dress and wields a Samoan fan as white flowers tumble from her hair. The ripe mango beside her alludes to fertility. In the background, Gauguin combined various non-European emblems—glyphs derived from an Easter Island tablet and a female deity inspired by Polynesian and Hindu sources—to build a generic sense of foreigness and mystery, transforming Tehamana into the embodiment of his own desire.
The authoritative record is held by Art Institute of Chicago. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Linked open data
Authority identifiers that link this record into the wider web of cultural data — stable references you can follow to the source.
- Object type
- AAT300033618
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Art Institute of Chicago and other institutions.
Portrait of Tehamana
Art Institute of Chicago
Head of a Tahitian Woman
Getty Museum
Mahana no atua (Day of the God)
Art Institute of Chicago
Head of a Tahitian Woman
Cleveland Museum of Art
Eve
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Laughing Demoness (Warai Hannya), from the series "One Hundred Ghost Tales (Hyaku monogatari)"
Art Institute of Chicago
Polynesian Woman with Children
Art Institute of Chicago
Peasant Love, No. 6 from the book Elegant Erotic Mane'emon (Fūryū enshoku Mane'emon), vol. 1
Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Courtesans Kasugano and Utahama of Tamaya, from Courtesans of the Pleasure Quarters in Double Mirrors
Cleveland Museum of Art
Portrait of Tomimoto Toyohina
Minneapolis Institute of Art
A Courtesan and her attendants under a cherry tree
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Reverberations of Taiga, Volume 2 (leaf 25)
Cleveland Museum of Art