Women were not the only figures portrayed androgynously during Gauguin’s travels in Polynesia. Much less often, but occasionally, Gauguin would paint Polynesian men whose bodies were similarly androgynous to the women he so often portrayed. A primary example of this, painted during his first visit to Tahiti, is Man with an Ax (1891). The painting captures a man at work in the foreground, lifting an ax as though he were about to strike some unseen object outside the edge of the canvas. Behind him is a woman gathering grains in a canoe. The respective jobs being executed by the man and woman seem to hold to gender lines, where the man engages in a more violently physical activity and the woman tends to something regarding food. Upon examination of their body positions and appearances, however, these same gender expectations do not hold up. The man, the most prominently featured of the two, is dressed in a much more revealing sarong that covers only a small portion of his midsection. The rest of his revealed body is quite slim and curvaceous and he does not appear to be using a great amount of force behind the ax. The tilt of his hips and head make his posture appear provocative and the ax seems like more of a prop than an actual tool. In contrast to the more modestly clothed woman, who is fully engaged in her work the man looks like a sexualized actor in a pose and displays many feminine qualities that are lacking in the woman, despite her more obvious female anatomy. This painting shows the opposite side of the androgynous spectrum of people Gauguin chose to portray in Tahiti.
Yet another example of an androgynous man can be seen in the much later painting, Marquesan Man in a Red Cape (1902). Gauguin spent his last few years in the Marquesan Islands where the people were supposedly “taller and stronger in physique and lighter in skin color than the other Polynesians� (Mathews 243). Marquesan Man in a Red Cape depicts a man in the wilderness who is being watched by a pair of women in the left corner. The composition is quite similar to that of Contes Barbares, painted in the same year. Similarly to the two women in Contes Barbares, the man looks out at the viewer, presumably unaware that he is being watched. What is different here is that he is dressed in a manner quite uncommon for a typical Marquesan man at the time. In Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life Nancy Mathews explains that “in Gauguin’s rearrangement of the man’s garments, the pareu is now inexplicably draped over his shoulders as a cape, leaving his legs visible and his shirt just barely covering his genitals�, a suggestion of sexual availability (Mathews 244). His long hair and posed stance also give him rather feminine traits, yet again suggesting one of Gauguin’s favorite themes, androgyny. Marquesan Man in a Red Cape makes quite an interesting comparison with Contes Barbares because of the similarity of the androgynous figures being watched from a distance. Here, however, the androgynous man is presented as sexually available while the women were much more occupied with the non-sexual routine of everyday life.