Painting Detail
Man Picking Fruit from a TreeArtist: Paul Gauguin
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 92.5x73.3 cm
Date: 1897
Genre: Genre Painting
Source: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, 1948
In this vision of earthly Paradise, Man receives from Nature everything he needs to live, simply stretching out his hand to take it. This was all part of Gauguin's romantic dream of natural harmony and simplicity, of the essential superiority of primitive cultures, which prompted him to live in Tahiti, his ideal of the primitive harmony of the world.
At the same time, the tree with its fruits is a symbol of the Tree of Knowledge, and a real scene provided the artist with the basis for a picture which goes beyond simple depiction to dwell on loss of innocence and thus of harmony and simplicity.
The calm, natural existence of man, nature and animals is here bowed to the eternal rhythm of the laws of the world, a rhythm which can be felt in lines, in generalised areas of colour and in the golden tones of the painting.