Gauguin spent much of 1893-94 in Paris working on the text and illustrations for Noa Noa (Fragrance). The project began as a book to guide an uncomprehending public through Gauguin's personal and artistic perceptions of Tahiti but ultimately became more complex and mysterious than anything he had produced in the South Seas. The remarkable series of ten woodbock prints that Gauguin made as illustrations bear no relationship to his romanticized autobiographical text. Nor do they seem to follow a narrative sequence. However, the imagery and themes of the prints--love and fear, creation and death, day and night--do closely relate to Gauguin's earliest Tahitian paintings.