Étude pour I raro te oviri
This conversation is connected to Étude pour I raro te oviri.
A dark animal in profile, walking to the right, its body rendered in heavy black wash with streaks of blue. The figure is gaunt, ribs and spine visible through the brushwork, the legs thin and slightly splayed. The background is largely bare paper — cream and gray with faint washes of blue and ochre at the upper left edge. "I raro te oviri" translates roughly from Tahitian as "under the pandanus" or "beneath the wild." The finished oil painting of the same title, from Gauguin's first Tahitian trip in 1891, is in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "Oviri" — Tahitian for "savage" or "wild" — was a word Gauguin returned to throughout his Polynesian period, most notably in the 1894 ceramic sculpture he considered his masterpiece and wanted placed on his grave. This study isolates the animal figure from the larger composition.