The Tahitian name of the canvas sounds like “Pape Mohe”. And this is a classic case for the entire creation of Gauguin – he even sought to ennoble the most ordinary situation, and even to impart some mystical features.
The painting “The Mysterious Source” was written with the help of a photograph that captured a young man drinking from a thin key. On the canvas the young man turned into a half-naked girl in a long loincloth. The usual key turned from a light hand of the painter into a mysterious source, full of hidden secrets. A thin stream pours out into a small stream, which Gauguin depicted as a colorful overflow of yellow, orange and gold.
An inquisitive spectator can find a mention of this picture in the autobiographical book “Misc”: “In a circus, painted in strange colors, like streams of either a diabolical or a divine drink, a mysterious source hits the distorted lips of the Unknown.” After, the author complains that at the Durand-Ruelle exhibition, someone exclaimed, where did Gauguin saw it, marveling at the allegorical nature of this work, designed to embody the worldly situation. And he immediately retorts – only a wise man seeks to penetrate into the essence of the surrounding world, having managed to consider all the secrets in it.
The picture is incredibly strong in its color embodiment – extremely bright colors, which, despite all the contrast in the fragmentary examination, combine into a harmonious plot.
The whole surrounding landscape is full of bright colors, so exotic that it seems impossible to harmoniously fit the human figure here without losing this magical primordiality. But in the painter it turned out to be filigree. Moreover, it was to this that he strove in the embodiment of the Tahitians and their way of life – in this inseparable connection with nature, Gauguin saw the highest good, first of all, for himself.
Having escaped from the deluged European world to the wild island, it seemed to him, and here he was destined to be disappointed – an inexorable whirlwind of progress got here, gradually replacing all the original and “natural”. Gauguin himself tried to catch the elusive mysterious magical past of a new exotic world for him, presenting more than a hundred wonderful works that revealed to all hitherto unknown aesthetics.
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