The Siesta

About this work

Gauguin painted "The Siesta" in Tahiti — women on a veranda in the afternoon, one ironing, the rest doing nothing. He had gone there to find an unspoiled world and found a thoroughly French colony: the fabrics and dresses in the painting are European. The picture itself is largely flat fields of colour inside contours, with no perspective.

Flat fields inside contours are mosaic’s natural state, so the work here is not in solving but in scale: how small the stone can go before the field loses its evenness.