[1] Pōmare V, who was pressured to abdicate and give Tahiti and its island dependencies to France in 1880, and who would later succumb to alcoholism, was not decapitated or put on similar public display.

[2] In Arii Matamoe, Gauguin achieves a tropical sensibility through a color palette ranging from muted purples and browns to yellows, reds, and vivid pinks.

[1] The severed head, displayed on a low-lying table or serving platter, is decorously presented with only a hint of blood; a despairing nude woman crouches nearby, while a figure just outside the room seems to proclaim the man's death to still more people further away.

[4] Getty curator Scott C. Allan has argued that Arii Matamoe is both a "symbolic self-portrait" and a "self-mythologizing work", which serves both to fetishize Gauguin's fantasies of cultural estrangement and martyrdom while hinting of possible redemption and renewal.

[1] Although well known to art historians and scholars, the painting was privately owned after World War II by a Swiss collector who, after 1946, lent it only once for an obscure domestic exhibition.