When Will You Marry?
1892 Paul Gauguin painting
When Will You Marry? (French: Quand te maries-tu ?, Tahitian: Nafea faa ipoipo?) is an oil painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. On loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland for nearly a half-century, it was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, in February 2015 for close to US$210 million (£155 million), one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art. The painting was on exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 28 June 2015.
History
Gauguin travelled to Tahiti for the first time in 1891. His hope was to find "an edenic paradise where he could create pure, 'primitive' art", rather than the primitivist faux works being turned out by painters in France. Upon arrival, he found that Tahiti was not as he imagined it: it had been colonised in the 18th century, and at least two-thirds of the indigenous people of the island had been killed by diseases brought by Europeans. "Primitive" culture had been wiped out. Despite this, he painted many pictures of native women: nude, dressed in traditional Tahitian clothes, and dressed in Western-style dresses, as is the rear figure in When Will You Marry?.
The front and middle ground are built up in areas of green, yellow and blue.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “When Will You Marry?” is 1892 Paul Gauguin painting. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through When, Will and Marry, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1892 Paul Gauguin painting” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3869871. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 2015 and 1891.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “When Will You Marry?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.