KATHRYN SHATTUCK

Eight years and two months. That’s how long Scott Schaefer waited for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to acquire “Arii Matamoe” (“The Royal End”), an 1892 painting by Paul Gauguin that Mr. Schaefer, the museum’s senior curator of paintings, called “the most famous painting by Gauguin that has been seen by no one.
Not that he was counting.
“I never thought it would happen in my lifetime,” Mr. Schaefer said, recalling how a dealer approached him with a transparency of the work soon after his arrival at the Getty in February 1999.
“Even the major Gauguin scholars hadn’t seen this picture,” he said, though the work is in the artist’s catalog and was one of only two that were included in “Noa Noa,” his autobiographical journal, published posthumously.
The 46-by-76-centimeter oil on coarse canvas - “the ultimate still life,” Mr. Schaefer said - depicts the severed head of a Polynesian man on a white pillow atop a low table, with grieving figures in the background.
The painting may have been inspired by the death of Pomare V, the former king of Tahiti, shortly after Gauguin’s arrival there in 1891, although decapitation was not a common death ritual.
A more likely explanation is that Gauguin, feeling somewhat of a failure amid successes of other Post-Impressionists, made it to shock the bourgeoisie and build interest in his exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1893, Mr. Schaefer said.
“He wanted to be rich and famous and shock people,” he said, “and I think he was hoping to renew himself in Tahiti and to find images that the Parisian public hadn’t seen before.”
Gauguin sold 11 paintings in 1893, two of them to Degas. “Arii Matamoe” was bought years later by the academic painter Henry Lerolle and remained in his family until the 1930s, when it was bought by a Swiss collector, the Getty says.
Although widely published, “Arii Matamoe” had been shown publicly only twice since then, in shows in 1946 and 1998 in Switzerland.
Fame and fortune eluded Gauguin during his lifetime, “but they happened very quickly after his death,” Mr. Schaefer said.“I think the times began to catch up with him.”
Even today the painting “is still a shock,” Mr. Schaefer said. “It’s an image a lot of people won’t be able to forget.”

KEY MOTIF Gauguin copied this background pattern, which resembles a Greek key design, from the pattern on the earplugs worn by men in the Marquesas Islands. “Gauguin’s sources range from all over,” said Scott Schaefer of the Getty Museum of Los Angeles. “There is a
great small industry in trying to determine where he came up with all his ideas.”

BACKGROUND FIGURES The image of a woman, seen from the back with her
arm raised, appears in dozens of works by Gauguin, Mr. Schaefer said,
explaining that the artist arrived in Tahiti with a trunk filled with drawings and prints of artworks that he hoped never to forget. “Gauguin had an incredibly retentive mind, and he was rather syncretistic, he said. “He delved into the world’s images and came up with unique images himself. Scholars are uncertain of the gender of the figures. “There was a sexual ambiguity in Gauguin that entered his paintings,” Mr. Schaefer said.

PALETTE “The painting must have been relatively shocking, if only for the colors,” Mr. Schaefer said. “It’s a higher-keyed palette
than most because it hadn’t been displayed often.” There is less fading in the yellow, for example, a common problem in paintings by Gauguin and van Gogh, he said. “I think he wanted to contrast it
with the darkness of the head and these extraordinary purple lips.”

MOURNING FIGURE The seated figure, which Gauguin used time and again in his paintings, was based on a Peruvian mummy he saw in the Museum of Ethnography in Paris. Gauguin’s mother was of Peruvian ancestry,
and his parents decided to move from France to Peru when Gauguin was
a small child. Gauguin’s father died during the sea passage, and his mother remained in Peru for several years, returning to France
when Gauguin was 7. Peruvian imagery figured later in his artwork.

TIKI GODS The humanoid Tiki figures of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands appear in several of Gauguin’s Tahitian works, said Scott Allan, an assistant curator at the Getty. Positioned in a guardianlike stance, “they certainly seem to mark some sort of symbolic threshold between the spaces of the living and the dead,’’ he said. Along with the other Polynesian items included in the scene, Mr. Allan said, they also provide a “vaguely sinister marker of the ‘primitive.’

HEAD The severed head could be “a study in lost innocence, the
end of the Tahitian civilization that would have been known a
century earlier,” Mr. Schaefer said. Or it might have been a nod to
the savagery that Parisians imagined in the colony but didn’t exist,
though Gauguin did not attempt to dissuade them. Or he could have done it for shock value, or to cater to the Symbolist trend of 1890s France, where “the decapitated head was something in the air in Paris,” Mr. Schaefer said.