The Siesta is an 1892-1894 oil on canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

[1] It was painted during Gauguin's first extended trip to the island of Tahiti.

The picture is an unpretentious representation of a group of Tahitian women in westernised clothes chatting in the cool shade of a verandah during the hot afternoon sun.

[2] Although the subject matter was an aspect of everyday life, Gauguin worked on the canvas over a long period, making several changes - the shopping bag in the foreground, for example, was previously a dog.

This article about a nineteenth-century painting is a stub.