SUSAN STEIN: Ia Orana Maria, the title Gauguin inscribed on the first major painting he made in Tahiti, is native dialect for the Angel Gabriel's first words to the Virgin Mary of the Annunciation: Hail Mary, or Ave Maria.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: Gauguin’s theme may be a Christian one, but he makes only a few concessions to tradition: the haloes around the heads of the mother and child, for example. And the fanciful angel at the far left, masked by exotic foliage.

SUSAN STEIN: Everything else in the picture, including the title, is rendered in Tahitian idiom.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: Gauguin offered his own description of the painting in a letter of 1892.

SUSAN STEIN: “An angel with yellow wings reveals Mary and Jesus, both Tahitians, to two Tahitian women, nudes dressed in pareus, a sort of cotton cloth printed with flowers that can be draped from the waist. Very somber, mountainous background and flowering trees... a dark violet path and an emerald green foreground, with bananas on the left. I'm rather happy with it.”

Designed to dazzle if not to shock, Gauguin presents a picture-perfect view of tropical splendor, replete with coconut palms, hibiscus plants, dotted with red flowers, and a bountiful arrangement of fruit, including globes of breadfruit and both yellow and wild red bananas, a great delicacy. It fulfills any Westerner's view of unspoiled paradise in striking combination with a rather unorthodox rendition of a biblical subject.