保羅.高更

喬治．維奧醫師， 巴黎 (賣出: 杜魯葉畫廊， 巴黎， 1907年3月21-22日，拍品編號33)
卡爾．西多爾．戴克曼， 科隆 (於1920年前購得)
赫曼．阿貝爾斯藝術沙龍  ， 科隆
亞伯特．奧騰， 美國新澤西州 (約於1920年購自上述人士處)
奧騰藝術收藏 (由上述人士之後人繼承並賣出:：紐約佳士得， 2002年11月6日， 拍品編號9)
現有藏家購自上述拍賣會

麥迪遜， 美國新澤西州， 德魯大學， 1958年
「奧騰藝術收藏，從庫爾貝到柯克西卡」，華森，美國麻薩諸塞州，布蘭代斯大學， 羅斯美術館， 1959年
「奧騰藝術收藏」，德拉瓦，美國俄亥俄州，衛斯里昂大學， 聯合紀念大樓， 1960年
「奧林匹亞的精神財富： 印象派與後印象派繪畫」，紐約， 維登斯坦公司，1965，品號 63，圖錄附圖版
「藝術的熱情：亞伯特．奧騰藝術收藏」，美國緬因州， 波特蘭藝術館， 1987-88年，品號20，圖錄附圖版

喬治．維登斯坦， 《高更  》， 第 1冊， 巴黎， 1964年，  品號492， 圖版頁199
加百列．M.． 蘇伽納， 《高更作品全集》， 米蘭， 1972年，品號316， 圖版頁105

The work is in good condition. Original thick-weave canvas, canvas is strip-lined. Under UV light there are a few small scattered spots of inpainting in the trees and in the roof of the house, as well as along the extreme edges of the canvas to address frame abrasions.
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Long before Gauguin arrived in Tahiti on June 9, 1891, he had been dreaming of escape. During the first decade of his life as a professional artist, he travelled to different destinations in search of a more authentic way of living than he felt could be found in Paris. Accompanied by Charles Lavalhe, he left for Panama in 1887, which served as a prelude to a stay on the island of Martinique from June to November. Closer to home, Brittany seemed a promising destination and fulfilled many of his expectations, as did Arles where Vincent van Gogh had been living since February 1888. The 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris provided even clearer indications that a destination on the other side of the world might offer what he was looking for. At the Colonial Exhibition there were colorful displays of dwellings and artifacts from all the colonies, and Tahiti was represented by two native huts located between the central Palace of Tunisia and huts from Annam and Tonkin.

In order to finance the voyage to Tahiti, a sale of thirty of Gauguin's works was held on February 23, 1891. He summarized his motives in an interview with Jules Huret published in L'echo de Paris on February 23, 1891: "I'm leaving so that I can be at peace and can rid myself of civilization's influence. I want to create only simple art. To do that, I need to immerse myself in virgin nature, see only savages, live their life, with no other care than to portray, as would a child, the concepts in my brain using only primitive artistic materials, the only kind that are good and true" (quoted in George T. M. Shackelford & Claire Frèches-Thory, Gauguin Tahiti (exhibition catalogue), Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003-04, p. 19).

Cabane sous les arbres was painted in 1892, the second year of Gauguin's first stay in Polynesia from June 1891 to June 1893. Not surprisingly, in view of his expectations, Papeete turned out to be a disappointment, a provincial outpost that aped many of the least appealing characteristics of the society he thought he had left behind. Expecting to reduce his expenses, he found that the cost of living was much higher than he anticipated and after several months left for Paea, a small village to the south of the capital and then to Maiteiea which was located about thirty kilometers further south. Here he was able to rent a fare, a bamboo hut beside a blue lagoon, and work in the idyllic atmosphere that he had imagined while living in France. For the first five months of his stay he had concentrated on drawing, familiarizing himself with his new environment. In a letter to Daniel de Monfreid on November 7, 1891, he wrote: "As yet I have done nothing striking, I am content to dig into myself, not into nature, and to learn a little drawing; that's the important thing. And then I am getting together subjects to paint in Paris" (ibid.,p. 25).

In works such as Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) of 1891 (fig. 1) and Te matete (The Market) of 1892, Gauguin approached his Tahitian subject matter through layers of cultural references, ranging from the use of a pose from a bas relief from the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Java in the former to a Theban tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty in the latter. In other less self-conscious canvases, he turned to the landscape itself for inspiration, as in the current work. During the formative decade of the 1880s Gauguin's style had evolved from his early Impressionist style to the extreme stylization characteristic of much of his work in Pont Aven. While continuing to develop this in Tahiti, however, Gauguin frequently modified it when documenting the daily life of the Tahitians or confronting the landscape, which differed so much from the Northern European environment in which he had felt so undernourished.

Here the focus is on the five large trees that dominate the composition with their spreading branches. The two figures to the left are walking towards the hut in the centre of the composition, emphasizing the remoteness of the location Gauguin has chosen to depict. In another painting of 1892, Fatata te moua (At the Big Mountain) a lone tree is the focal point, although in this case he has exaggerated the color contrasts and emphasized the decorative potential of the landscape (fig. 2). In the present work, he has reverted to a technique reminiscent of his Impressionist landscapes of the previous decade while emphasizing the brilliant colors characteristic of the tropical landscape of Tahiti.

This work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Paul Gauguin and the Gesamtkunstwerk at the Belvedere Vienna scheduled to take place from October 18, 2013 to February 9, 2014.