Self-Portrait as a Tahitian is a self-portraiture, an oil painting on canvas created in 1934 in Paris by Hungarian-born Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil.

In 1934 the painting was exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries, Paris, alongside her 1932 portrait of her friend Boris Taslitzky, Young Man with Apples.

The work has been seen as Sher-Gil's response to seeing Paul Gauguin's Faa Iheihe in London in 1933, and hence a tribute to him, with a combination of east and west.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was born in Hungary to an Indian aristocrat and his Hungarian Jewish wife, an opera singer.

[2][3] There, she was influenced by her uncle, Ervin Baktay, who encouraged her to carefully observe the reality around her and transfer it to her work, particularly using live models.

[5] Sher-Gil created Self-Portrait as a Tahitian in oil on canvas in early 1934, while she was studying at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

[13][14] Sher-Gil wrote "they will go well together, a good contrast: with one in blues and yellows (it's a nude you do not know, I started it after you left), and the other in harmony of pink and white.

[10] Bringing the issue of "race" to attention, philosopher Nalini Bhushan sees Sher-Gil as depicting the Indian part of herself, with the Tahitian representing the perfectly appearing non-European.

"[10] Her interpretation is that the painting "conceals a deep engagement with the strategies of self-portraiture and acts of masquerade undertaken by both Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh in the late 1880s".

[10] Describing the image as "striking in her composure; she is resolutely female, self-possessed, and full of repose", Mathur proposes that Sher-Gil’s self-portrait is not just a tribute to Gauguin or simply an example of neo-primitivism.

[12][21] Mathur postulates it could be a "symbol of the dominating influence of the two painters" Gauguin or Van Gogh, and her "own search for a place for herself within the creation of modernism's master discourse".

[21] She notes that the Indian art critic Geeta Kapur connects Sher-Gil with the artist Frida Kahlo; both representing "women in and through the experience of otherness", and therefore giving an alternative take of the traditional nude.