Lisa is taking a photo of Van Gogh's Landscape from Saint-Rémy (1889) in the background.

Next to that is Paul Gauguin's Apatarao (1893), a neighborhood of Papeete spelled Apaatarao these days, close to where we stayed for the first week of The Big Trip. The jury is out - or maybe it's in - on whether Gauguin was a prototype of what we now call a sexpat.

[Gauguin] spent his Tahitian years with an eye toward the French market, producing paintings, drawings, woodcuts, and ceramics full of tropical clichés to sell at home. He also took three young wives (ages 13, 14, and 14), infected them with syphilis, and eventually died from syphilitic complications at the age of 54 in the remote Marquesas Islands. -- Meredith Mendelsohn