When he later arrived in Tahiti to find that physically, the women were built similarly to the men, he was fascinated and made it his task to capture those traits in his paintings. Gauguin’s arrival in Tahiti is marked by numerous paintings that suggest a noticeable difference between the corseted and ultra feminine women of France and the Polynesian women. Thus while critiquing one of Gauguin’s early Tahitian portraits, Robert Goldwater notes, “Gauguin wrote with admiration of the erect stature, the broad shoulders, the strength with grace of the Polynesian women� (Goldwater 152). While Goldwater identifies this admiration in Gauguin’s writing, he forgoes to identify the same admiration in numerous works of art as well. This type of “erect� stature is depicted in Vahine no te Tiare or Tahitian Woman with a Flower (1891), one of Gauguin’s very first portraits of a Tahitian woman. In this painting the woman is in a very modest pose that matches the modest character of her high collared dress, which hides nearly every curve of her body beyond her obviously broad shoulders. Her dress is too loose to function as a restrictive device like the French women, even though it seems to force her into a stiff pose, regardless. Indeed, the awkward incorporation of a French style dress on her brawny body highlights how deviant she seems from the socially accepted French woman. This early painting marks the beginning of Gauguin’s references to French restraint and the Polynesian deviation from it: namely that the Polynesian women do not belong in the French clothing because they are, both physically and literally, too strong for them.
Gauguin painted a similar work a year later, Vahine no to Vi or Woman of the Mango (1892), this time showing more physical liberation in the body of the woman by loosening her dress and relaxing her pose. Again, the dress reveals only her thick-boned stature, specifically the shoulders. This dress, however, is even less restrictive than that in Vahine no te Tiare. Instead, the woman sits at an angle that suggests twisting and movement, and below the waist the dress billows out so that it is impossible to tell where her legs are situated. As such, Gauguin allowed for this woman’s body to move in any direction, a notion that was exactly contrary to the standards of contemporary French fashion. For example, Marie Simon, author of Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism explains that “nineteenth-century dress was an architecture superimposed on the body, hiding it to a great extent and modifying it profoundly� (Simon 158). In Vahine no te Tiare, Gauguin demonstrated how the Tahitian women rejected this rigid style along with the rigid code of behavior that presumably went along with it. Instead, the women of Tahiti were loose and mobile, allowing their strong bodies to show through the clothes that tried to hide them. Gauguin’s portraits were specifically designed to emphasize the contrast between these Polynesian women and the French women who would see the paintings upon their arrival in France.