THE British Museum has reunited the two halves of a picture by Paul Gauguin that was sliced in two by the artist. The missing upper half came up for sale at Sotheby’s and the museum has had the lower section for more than 50 years.

The two fragments of the Noa Noa woodcut — a striking depiction of Tahitians in their tropical Eden, created after Gauguin’s return from the South Seas — were separated in 1893.

Jonathan Pratt, the auction-house’s print specialist, visited the museum to check it against other Gauguin prints as part of his research.

When it was placed next to the museum’s existing fragment it was a perfect match. Further confirmation came when the fragments were examined under a microscope.

A lip on the bottom edge of the upper fragment matched a corresponding loss on the lower half. The solid red of the skirt of the Tahitian girl, which was divided in half, also matched.

Stephen Coppel, the museum’s assistant keeper in the department of prints and drawings, said: “It’s astonishing that they should have come together after 100 years.”

Gauguin (1848-1903) went to Tahiti in 1891 to escape the pressures of modern life and seek an unspoilt society in tune with nature.

He created the Noa Noa woodcut after holding an exhibition in 1893 at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris of work inspired by his trip.

The show was a financial disaster, barely covering costs, but it did draw visitors.

Encouraged by the public’s curiosity, Gauguin set about describing his experiences of life in Tahiti in a manuscript he called Noa Noa — meaning “fragrant scent” in Polynesian, accompanied by ten woodcuts.

“After the disease of civilisation, life in this new world is a return to health,” he wrote.

The woodcut was the project’s frontispiece. The title is found alongside the artist’s initials, “PGO” — which is also sailor’s slang for penis, after the Greek pego — a monogram that he used above a stylised palm tree. Gauguin worked on the prints over the winter months in 1893 and 1894, getting his friend Louis Roy to print up to thirty impressions of each of the ten blocks.

But the artist declared that some of them were unsympathetic to his original vision. The acid yellow and strong reds were very different from the more atmospheric earlier prints that he had done himself.

He is known to have cut up the work with which he was unhappy. “He was quite cavalier about his prints,” Mr Coppel said.

“But if you compare Louis Roy’s with those Gauguin printed, Gauguin inks the blocks in a way that draws out the sense of mystery and darkness — a primeval primitivism — of the South Seas.”

He was one of the first artists to find visual inspiration in the arts of ancient or primitive peoples. Gauguin made his second trip to the South Seas in 1894 and never returned to his native France. But the Noa Noa woodcuts, with their crudely carved, “primitive” appearance, were to have a profound effect on later artists, particularly Munch.

The British Museum acquired its incomplete woodcut in 1949 as part of a bequest of 5,000 prints — including the works of Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec — from Campbell Dodgson, a former keeper in the department of prints and drawings.

The museum was able to acquire the upper fragment for about £3,000 from its Swiss owner “Clearly our cut Gauguin came at a cut price,” Mr Coppel said.

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