Ta matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today)

Ta matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today): Introduction

Five women sit along a narrow bench. Their shoulders form a near-continuous band, but their heads, hands and legs interrupt it with small changes of direction. One turns into profile, another faces more directly out of the picture, and bent arms rise like a repeated sequence of signs. Blue tree trunks divide the background. Broad green, pale violet and ochre zones stack the setting rather than opening it into deep space. ^[1]

At a Glance

• ArtistPaul Gauguin ^[1]
• TitleTa matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today) ^[1]
• Date1892 ^[1]
• Mediumoil painting ^[1]
• Dimensions / object size73.2 by 91.5 centimetres ^[1]
• Object recordTa matete (Le marché); English Ta matete (The Market); 1892; inv. 1849; Kunstmuseum Basel ^[1]
• FocusFive women sit along a narrow bench.

Contents

1. Ta matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today): Introduction
2. The Basel painting
3. A market arranged as a frieze
4. What happens at the market?
5. An observed scene or a constructed image?
6. From Vollard to Basel

Paul Gauguin painted TA MATETE at the lower left of this carefully organised surface. Kunstmuseum Basel explains the phrase as a Tahitianised form of the English word market and titles the work Ta matete (The Market) in English. ^[1] The familiar name We Shall Not Go to Market Today has a real institutional history—it headed the painting's entry in the Art Institute of Chicago's 1959 Gauguin catalogue—but it should not be mistaken for Basel's literal translation of the inscription. ^[2]

That title problem opens the painting's larger question. Ta matete appears to present a local encounter, yet almost every part of it has been selected and recombined: imported clothing, a colonial town's market, a photographic record of ancient Egyptian art and a format devised for circulation beyond Tahiti.

The Basel painting

Kunstmuseum Basel records Ta matete (Le marché) as an 1892 oil painting on jute measuring 73.2 by 91.5 centimetres. It is inventory 1849. The museum transcribes P Gauguin 92 at the lower right and TA MATETE at the lower left. ^[1] The jute support matters. It is the holding museum's current material identification and replaces the older oil on canvas wording in the 1959 catalogue rather than describing a second version. ^[2]

The five seated figures occupy most of the width but only the middle of the canvas. Above them, trunks and large simplified shapes make a dark, irregular screen. Below, their feet and the bench meet flat bands of ground. The result is both compressed and highly legible: bodies are kept distinct by changes of colour and contour even where shoulders overlap.

Their long, high-necked dresses are equally important. Sleeves, collars and patterned hems give the row a rhythm of dark green, blue, mauve and white. These are not bodies offered as an undressed fantasy of an untouched island. The clothes belong to a society already transformed by European mission, trade and colonial rule. ^[4] Yet dress alone cannot identify occupation, status, religion or personal choice. It establishes visible material culture, not the life story of any one sitter.

A market arranged as a frieze

The bench makes the group read from side to side. Gauguin strengthens that effect by reducing the setting to parallel bands and by giving each figure a compact silhouette. The sequence resembles a frieze, but not because the women have become identical. Their inclinations and gestures produce variation within the order: a hand turns outward, another rests nearer the body, profiles alternate with more frontal heads, and differently coloured dresses keep the line from becoming mechanical.

The 1959 Art Institute catalogue identified the source of this construction with unusual precision. It observed that the women's upper bodies tend towards the frontal while heads, legs and feet turn into profile. It connected that combination to an Eighteenth-Dynasty Egyptian tomb painting from Thebes, known to Gauguin through a photograph in his possession. ^[2] Kunstmuseum Basel gives the same period, place and photographic route, describing Gauguin's use of the source as a hybrid appropriation. ^[1]

A Guggenheim archive transcript of Douglas Cooper's 1981 lecture independently repeats the Theban, Eighteenth-Dynasty source and the owned photograph. ^[3] These sources do not, however, securely name a particular tomb or British Museum object. Calling the model the Tomb of Nebamun would therefore be narrower than the evidence reviewed for this painting.

The Egyptian comparison explains structure, not meaning by itself. Gauguin did not reproduce the ancient painting as an archaeological record. He extracted a way of aligning bodies and combining frontal and profile views, then applied it to contemporary figures in French-colonial Tahiti. The act joins different places and times under his authorship. It demonstrates visual intelligence, but it also demonstrates control: a European artist selected a museum-mediated African source to organise Polynesian people for a picture destined for European attention.

What happens at the market?

Basel says the title probably refers to the market at Papeete. Its collection text also notes the market's association with women offering sexual services. ^[1] That context cannot simply be transferred to every person on the bench. The painting supplies no names, ages, prices, customers or unmistakable transaction. A gesture is not a contract, and proximity within the row does not prove a shared occupation.

The distinction is ethically important because the painting encourages speculation while withholding evidence. Repeated hand positions can look conversational or transactional, and the title points towards commerce, but neither tells us who speaks or what is exchanged. It is defensible to say that Basel reads the work against Papeete's sexual economy. It is not defensible to label all five represented women as sex workers or to invent their consent, intentions or relationships.

Commerce nevertheless reaches further into the picture than a possible subject. Papeete was a colonial port and market. ^{[1] [4]} Gauguin's inscription adapts an English commercial word into a Tahitian form, while the painting itself eventually moved through Parisian dealing, German collecting and the Swiss museum system. The market is therefore both an indicated place and part of the work's own history as a commodity.

An observed scene or a constructed image?

The painting has enough specificity to feel observed: the dresses differ, gestures vary and the seated bodies do not form a perfect pattern. But the Theban source shows that visual plausibility is not the same as documentary transparency. Gauguin could begin from people and clothing he had seen, then reorganise them through a photograph of an ancient work and the demands of his own flattened design.

This mixed procedure resists two misleading extremes. Ta matete is not a candid report whose figures can be read as evidence of individual biography. Nor is it an entirely detached fantasy with no relation to Papeete's social world. It is a constructed image made within that world, using visible contemporary details while placing their interpretation under Gauguin's formal and commercial control.

A current National Gallery of Australia reassessment argues that Gauguin's Pacific work must be considered alongside colonial history and conduct that require renewed scrutiny. ^[4] For Ta matete, that scrutiny begins with source discipline. The market context should not be erased, especially where it includes sexual commerce. Equally, colonial history must not become permission to assign one stigmatised identity to every unnamed woman in the painting.

From Vollard to Basel

The museum's provenance starts with Ambroise Vollard in Paris by the end of 1903 and probably passes through Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen. The work appeared as lot 25 at the Paul Cassirer and Hugo Helbing sale in Berlin on 8 March 1917, then belonged to Sally Falk in Mannheim. After brief handling by Cassirer and Heinrich Thannhauser in 1918, it entered Robert von Hirsch's collection that September. Von Hirsch later settled in Basel and gave the painting to the Kunstmuseum in 1941. ^[1]

That route makes the painting's audiences visible. A scene associated with Papeete was titled through a Tahitianised English word, structured through an ancient Egyptian image preserved in a European museum photograph, sold through European dealers and auctions, and finally incorporated into a Swiss public collection. None of those stages cancels the women represented. Each shows how little authority they had over the meanings and value attached to their image.

Ta matete is compelling because its order never becomes simple. The bench unites the group while every posture remains slightly different. The title points to a market without fixing an event. The Egyptian source clarifies the composition while complicating any claim to direct observation. The most responsible close reading therefore keeps both sides in view: a formally powerful arrangement and the colonial, sexual and commercial structures through which that arrangement was made and circulated.

Related Pages

• Woman Holding a Fruit
• The Siesta
• Why Are You Angry? (No te aha oe riri)
• Tahitian Mountains (Tahitian Landscape)

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Kunstmuseum Basel, Ta matete (Le marché), current collection record, inv. 1849 View source
2. Art Institute of Chicago, Gauguin: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture (1959), cat. 49, We Shall Not Go to Market Today (Ta Matete), p. 50 View source
3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, Douglas Cooper, The Heritage of Gauguin, 1981 lecture transcript, p. 3 View source
4. National Gallery of Australia, Gauguin's World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, current exhibition overview and contemporary-context statement View source