Hina tefatou (The moon and the earth) depicts a nude woman and a stoic male figure, who looks directly ahead as if to meet our own gaze. His torso appears to be behind the landscape that Gauguin has painted, making him disproportionately large when compared to her. You may recognise his face from the nearby bronze sculpture, Tahitian, which shows the same parted hairstyle.
Hina tefatou is Gauguin’s interpretation of a pre-colonial Polynesian myth that he read in the ethnographer Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout’s 1837 book Travels to the Pacific Ocean. Gauguin was particularly fond of the story of Hina and Fatou, where the moon goddess Hina asks her son, the earth god Fatou, to make humans immortal. Fatou denies her request, condemning humanity to their fate. This exchange is captured through Hina’s outstretched arms, Fatou’s indifferent expression, and a connection symbolically drawn between them by a leafy vine.
The goddess Hina became a subject that the artist returned to often in his work. In March 1892 he wrote to his friend the artist Paul Sérusier:
What a religion the ancient Oceanian religion is. What a marvel! My brain is bursting with it and all it suggests to me will certainly frighten people. If they are afraid to have my old paintings in an exhibition, then what will they say about the new ones?
While Gauguin found inspiration in Polynesian myth, he was also inspired by differences in the light and colour of his new environment. Compare the nighttime setting and symbolism of Hina tefatou to the nearby Two nudes on a Tahitian beach. While both compositions depict similar nude figures, Two nudes on a Tahitian beach studies the intensity of light and colour in the Pacific. He later recalled:
Everything in the [Tahitian] landscape blinded and dazzled me. Coming from Europe I was always uncertain of a colour… yet [in Tahiti] it was so easy to put a red and a blue on my canvas.
If you look closely at this painting, you can see that parts of it remain unresolved. In his letters, Gauguin commented that it took months of sketching and drawing upon his arrival in Tahiti to ‘grasp the Oceanian character’ before he was confident enough to begin painting Tahitian subjects.
