The Seed of the Areoi

In the spring of 1891 Gauguin traveled to Tahiti, then a French colony. He hoped to find an enchanting paradise, however, by that time Tahiti had been profoundly altered by French colonization: poverty and sickness were rampant. Still, in his paintings of the island, Gauguin included elements of the imaginary, configuring Tahiti as a pre-modern land of leisure. His use of bright, flat, and unrealistic colors and his interest in recovering a "pure" subject, closer to nature, were greatly influential to the next generation of European artists, including the Fauves and German Expressionists. Gauguin liked to claim that he discovered this palette in the Tahitian landscape: "the landscape with its bright, burning colors dazzled and blinded me, it was so simple to paint things as I saw them."
In this painting Gauguin represents his young Tahitian mistress as Vairaumati, the mythic earth-mother of the Areoi sect in Polynesian mythology. The flowering seed she holds in her hand symbolically represents her potential to bear children. Wedded to the god Oro, Vairaumati gave birth to the Areoi people.