Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau) is an 1892 oil on burlap canvas painting by Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, depicting a nude Tahitian

Tahitians

The Tahitians, or Maohis, are indigenous peoples of Tahiti and thirteen other Society Islands, as well as the modern population of these lands of mixed ancestry . The Tahitians are one of the most significant indigenous Polynesian peoples of Oceania....

 girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her. In Tahitian mythology the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her.

The subject of the painting was Gauguin's Tahitian wife Tehura, then 14 years old, who one night, according to Gauguin, was lying in fear when he arrived late home: "immobile, naked, lying face downward on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear . . . Might she not with her frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?" The spirit she fears is personified by the old woman seated at left. The strong colors are symbolic of the native Polynesian belief

Polynesian mythology

Polynesian mythology is the oral traditions of the people of Polynesia, a grouping of Central and South Pacific Ocean island archipelagos in the Polynesian triangle together with the scattered cultures known as the Polynesian outliers...

 that phosphorescent

Phosphorescence

Phosphorescence is a specific type of photoluminescence related to fluorescence. Unlike fluorescence, a phosphorescent material does not immediately re-emit the radiation it absorbs. The slower time scales of the re-emission are associated with "forbidden" energy state transitions in quantum...

 lights were manifestations of the spirits of the dead

Ghosts in Polynesian culture

There was widespread belief in ghosts in Polynesian culture, some of which persists today.After death, a person's ghost would normally travel to the sky world or the underworld, but some could stay on earth. In many Polynesian legends, ghosts were often actively involved in the affairs of the living...

.

The painting appears to be related to a series of "frightened Eves" that Gauguin painted in 1889. For art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews

Nancy Mowll Mathews

Nancy Mowll Mathews is an American art critic, curator, and author. She was the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art, from 1988 to 2010. Mathews is the author of Mary Cassatt: A Life and of Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life .-External...

, Gauguin's interest in depicting formal qualities of line and movement, mild eroticism and fright preceded the narrative aspect, a "pretext for the girl's emotions." Mathews doubts Gauguin's explanation that Tehura confused him with her irrational fears of spirits and darkness; rather, she suggests that the girl's fear would have been in response to Gauguin's aggressive behavior, and consistent with his physical abuse of women.

Other scholars have viewed the narrative as a pretext to make the sexuality of the subject more acceptable to a European audience. In a letter Gauguin explained the color and symbolism of the painting:

General harmony, somber, sad, frightening, telling in the eye like a funeral knell. Violet, somber blue, and orange-yellow. I make the linen greenish-yellow: 1 because the linen of this savage is a different linen than ours (beaten tree bark); 2 because it creates, suggests artificial light (the Kanaka woman never sleeps in darkness) and yet I don't want the effect of a lamp (it is common); 3 this yellow linking the orange-yellow and the blue completes the musical harmony. There are several flowers in the background, but they should not be real, being imaginative, I make them resemble sparks. For the Kanaka, the phosphorescences of the night are from the spirit of the dead, they believe them there and fear them. Finally, to end, I make the ghost quite simply, a little old woman; because the young girl not being acquainted with scenes of French spirits can not do other than see linked to the spirit of the dead, death itself, that is to say, a person like herself.

According to Gauguin, the phosphorescences that could be seen in Tahiti at night, and which natives believed to be the exhalations of the spirits of the dead, were emitted by mushrooms that grew on trees. The description of the spirit of the dead that the artist would have been familiar with came from the work of Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti was a French novelist and naval officer.-Biography:Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At the age of seventeen he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906...

, who described the spirit as a "blue-faced monster with sharp fangs"; the decision to paint an old woman instead of a bizarre demon may have been prompted by the desire to use a symbol that would be more familiar to a European audience.

This painting appears in the background of another Gauguin painting, his Self-portrait with Hat, possibly indicating its importance to him.