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Lot Essay
In 1894, Gauguin executed a stoneware sculpture of the Tahitian Goddess Oviri, the deity of death and mourning whose name translates from Tahitian as 'savage'. The goddess clutches a shewolf cub to her, a symbol of her wild power. Oviri is also the name of the melancholy song which Gauguin translated and included in Noa Noa. It expressed the artist's own attraction to the wild and 'uncivilized' world in which he found himself in voluntary exile and which he had enthusiastically embraced.
Merete Bodelsen has written that "Gauguin sometimes also referred to himself as Oviri, the savage . . . The importance he attached to the statue appears from the letter he wrote to Daniel Monfreid in October 1900, in which he expresses the wish to have this stoneware figure of Oviri placed on his tomb in the Pacific" (op. cit., p. 152).
Merete Bodelsen has written that "Gauguin sometimes also referred to himself as Oviri, the savage . . . The importance he attached to the statue appears from the letter he wrote to Daniel Monfreid in October 1900, in which he expresses the wish to have this stoneware figure of Oviri placed on his tomb in the Pacific" (op. cit., p. 152).