“Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.”
Genesis 3:20
After leaving Brittany and returning to Paris in 1889, a new Eve literally rises during Gauguin’s stay in France, and takes a new form in Gauguin’s work, serving as a link from his time in Brittany to his future stay in Tahiti. This transition period between these two foreign locales is a crucial period of development for Eve in Gauguin’s works. Rather than remaining seated, as in the previous two paintings, Eve eventually stands for the first time in Exotic Eve 1890, further freeing herself from the constraints of European culture and physically allowing herself to guide Gauguin out of these restrictive society as well. In this painting, Eve is taking a piece of fruit from the tree with the serpent on the left side of the painting, holding another piece in her other hand in the center, and observing a rooster and hen mating on the right. Here, Gauguin tells the story of the Temptation, but rather than concentrate on this act as the portal to a world filled with sin, he instead manifests this moment as the beginning of new life with the copulating animals on the right. It is also no coincidence that this Eve was painted with Gauguin’s mother’s features (Amishai-Maisels 374), as he considered Eve to be the mother of all life on Earth, and like Eve, it is a mother’s job to guide and prepare her children for the world that they are a part of.
Still bored with Europe, it was not until later this year that Gauguin decided to go to Tahiti to continue his search for the “primitive,” believing that this island would finally serve as his ultimate Paradise. In a letter to fellow symbolist, Odilon Redon, Gauguin writes:
"I am set in my decisions, and since I have been in Brittany I have modified it. Madagascar is still too near to the civilized world; I am going to go to Tahiti and I hope to finish my life there. I believe that my art, which you love, is only a seed and I hope that down there I can cultivate it for myself to a primitive and savage state." (qtd Prather 50)
Here, Gauguin shows that he needs to leave Europe in order to immerse himself in his ideal primitive culture and to allow his art to grow. Hoping to find his cultivating Garden of Eden in Tahiti, it is only with Eve as his guide that he can develop as an artist and have his art blossom into his “primitive and savage state”.