◧ Artist: Paul Gauguin (Paris 1848 - 1903 French Polynesia)
◧ Medium: Oil painting
◧ Museum: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
◧ Date of Issue: June 7,1973
◧ Face Value: 200 Franc
◧ Issued as Air Mail
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Paul Gaugin visited French Polynesia for the first time in 1891. Gauguin set sail for Tahiti, the largest island of French Polynesia, on April 1, 1891. He stayed in French Polynesian islands until he returned to France in August 1893. Then he set out for Tahiti again on June 28, 1895, arriving there in September 1895 and he never saw the European continent again.
" Ta Matete" means "The Market." It is one of the most constant characteristics of Gauguin's art that while his sources of inspiration remain clear and undisguised, they contribute to an entirely original creation. Here (in [Ta Matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today)]) unmistakably Egypt has been put to his own uses: the sequence of seated figures, all aligned and hardly overlapping, the combination of profile and frontal views, the rigid gestures, the long robes, the accentuated fingers, and the accented silhouettes, recall the intaglio reliefs of the temples of the Nile.
"Line is a means of accentuating an idea," said Gauguin. [copyright © 2011-Present www.Gauguin.org]
