Paul Gauguin: Ta matete (The Market), 1892 – Porcelain Art Mug

Five women sit side by side on a green bench, turned in strict profile, their hands raised in small, deliberate gestures. Nobody looks at anybody. Behind them, under blue tree trunks, figures cross a pale square, and a sixth woman in a red-and-yellow pareu closes the row at the right like a curtain.

The stiff, frieze-like order is borrowed. Gauguin kept a photograph of an Egyptian wall painting from a tomb at Thebes, made some 3,300 years earlier, and lifted its seated figures and their raised hands into a Tahitian scene. The title is the Tahitian form of the English word "market"; it probably points to the market in Papeete, a place with an ambiguous reputation in colonial Tahiti. Gauguin painted the picture in 1892, during his first stay on the island.

Its later path is a small history of modern collecting. The Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard set it aside for Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum; in 1917 and 1918 it changed hands at auction and among dealers in Berlin and Munich. In 1941 the collector Robert von Hirsch, who had left Frankfurt for Basel, gave it to the city as thanks for his Swiss citizenship.

Look at the lower left corner of the mug: Gauguin lettered the title, TA MATETE, straight into the paint; his signature and the date "92" sit at the lower right.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Paul Gauguin, Ta matete (The Market), 1892; oil on jute, 73.2 × 91.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, gift of Dr. h.c. Robert von Hirsch, 1849. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.