Gauguin spent the last years of his life in Polynesia. The artist's imagination combined his impressions of Tahiti with what he learned of ancient cultures to create an enigmatic and exotic world full of symbolic images. He felt that the world of the so-called "savages" had preserved that natural harmony which had been lost by the "civilisation" of Europe.
Not all of the images in Gauguin's can be decoded. It is possible that this work contains some as yet unclear symbolic meaning, and yet at the same time it is a decorative work in which the artist achieved a harmony between areas of colour and rhythmic lines. In the women's poses we see particular grace and plasticity. The central girl recalls a figure depicted on a relief in the Borobudur Temple on the island of Java.