Getty Lands a Morbid Gauguin

The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired an 1892 work by Paul Gauguin the Los Angeles institution's curator calls "the most famous painting by Gauguin that no one has seen," the Los Angeles Times reports. Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)—bought from a Swiss collector for an undisclosed sum—is one of the painter's most morbid Tahitian paintings, depicting a severed head on a pillow.

Gauguin painted Arii Matamoe on his first trip to Tahiti after abandoning his banking job in France. While the severed head may represent a Polynesian king who died around the time of the work, it also echoes earlier decapitations in Western art history, experts say, from Orpheus to John the Baptist. (More J. Paul Getty Museum stories.)