here are many art critics that believe Teha’amana was the model for the majority of paintings that Gauguin produced while in Tahiti. For this reason, it is possible to assume that one of the two women depicted in the ‘When Will You Marry?’ painting is the artist’s Tahitian wife. This statement seems even more likely once you consider that the two women who appear in the painting also appear in many of his other works from the period.
During Gauguin’s journey into Primitivism, he treated a lot of his painting as a meditation on the meaning of big ideas like human existence and love. If you analyse ‘When Will You Marry?’ you can see that it is another of the artist’s paintings that explores the idea of love in a non-erotic context.
Take a look at the two women in the painting. One is wearing a white flower that symbolises purity and the desire to find a husband, and the other is an older lady making a gesture that in Buddhist art means warning. For this reason it is possible to consider the painting’s theme as one of a relationship between innocence and knowledge. Or, in other words, the older woman reflects experience of love, while the younger woman is still unaware of the complexity of emotions that come with such feelings.