Baby (Nativity of Tahitian Christ)

A Nativity moved

The recorded title carries its own displacement: a nativity described as Tahitian. The episode being invoked is the birth at Bethlehem, the opening of the whole cycle, and the point of the title is that the setting is not Bethlehem. Transposing a sacred episode into a contemporary or distant setting is an old device, and in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was being used to argue that the story did not belong to one place.

Where it falls in the cycle

At the start, if the title is taken at its word. But the record itself declines to read the work as religious: the subject fields class it under portraits, a group of figures, animal art and the architectural, with no religious classification anywhere in the entry. That silence is worth stating rather than overriding, because it means the catalogue treats the sacred reference as a title and not as a subject.

The record

The catalogue gives Paul Gauguin, 1896, and the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. It measures 66 x 75 cm, close to square and small. No style is entered in the tags; the artist is recorded as French. The measured palette reads as ochre. Nothing in the record concerns how the canvas reached Saint Petersburg, and this page does not supply it.