Gauguin took his first trip to Tahiti in the early 1890s. It’s not known if he made this picture just before his departure from that Polynesian Island in 1894, or immediately after his return to Paris.

Unlike many of Gauguin's other Tahitian paintings, The Siesta has no complex religious or mythological associations. Instead, it's a kind of Polynesian genre scene, representing a group of Tahitian women seeking refuge from the hot afternoon sun in the shade of a crudely constructed wooden porch. They are clothed in the so-called "missionary" dresses that were regularly imported from England.

As in all of Gauguin's mature paintings, radical formal simplifications lay at the very heart of his unique style. The figures consist primarily of flat areas of color bounded by clear continuous outlines. Only in the subtly mottled surface of the porch's wooden floor and in the sun-drenched landscape in the background does Gauguin allow his colors to mingle together in a more casual, less rigorously regimented manner.