Fatata Te Miti

Fatata Te Miti (En: By the Sea) is an oil painting by Paul Gauguin. It is dated 1892. It measures 26 3/4 x 36 in. It hangs in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The picture was painted a few months after Gauguin's first arrival in Tahiti. He retreated to the island's interior to live among the natives. Tehura, Gauguin's vahine, probably posed for the female on the right. John Walker writes, "In all his canvases painted in the South Seas, Complementary colorsorange and blue, yellow and violet, green and redat their highest intensities and without modulation of values, are balanced harmoniously against each other, forming beautiful, almost abstract patterns.