Spirits of the Flowers Keep Watch: My Jeanne Baret Dubernat
At Home with
Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau)
Paul Gauguin
1892
oil on burlap
45.6 × 53 in.
Albright Knox Art Gallery. Buffalo, New York
[Jeanne Baret Dubernat footnotes:]
Although my floral interpretation depicts Gauguin's, There Dwells the Temple, shown here in the background, it's his painting Spirit of the Dead Watching that I'm concerned with, and shown holding, here.
A friend gave me a booklet of Gauguin art stickers. Gauguin's fame as an artist has reached the realm of art sticker booklets, coffee mugs, and silk scarves. But it's his time in Tahiti that intersects with Jeanne's life.
I like to think that Gauguin's travel to Tahiti in 1887 was inspired in part by Jeanne's voyage, and the words of her captain, Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811) and his mythology of Tahiti as a pristine Garden of Eden, a New Cythera, (Nouvelle Cythere), which in Greek mythology was the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and lust. Bougainville waxed poetic about the "noble savages" of Tahiti who were further mythologized by Diderot (supplement au voyage de Bougainville, 1771).
Gauguin followed this mythological thread and lived and loved amongst these noble people.
Spirits always keep watch.