It is an irony of formalism that Hawaiian Three Graces, one of Madge Tennent’s most nuanced and intriguing works, is also one of her least vivid. Given her long-established penchant for thoughtfully manipulating color and technique to match underlying intent, this is no accident. Indeed, there is so much to dissect in the painting’s content that any addition of pigment might have distracted from the force of her message. Instead, we are left with one bewitching question: What, exactly, was Mrs. Tennent saying here? The artist’s uncharacteristic silence on the matter renders it all the more intriguing.

This painting is, ostensibly, based on the celebrated Renaissance-era paintings and prints by Brunelleschi, Pieter de Jode II, and Raphael, as well as a seminal marble by Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, all of which were well known to Madge Tennent.* The subjects of these works originated in Hesiod’s Theogony, which enumerates three daughters of Zeus, collectively known as the Charites (or Graces), each of whom bestowed a particular gift on humanity: Aglaea (radiance), Euphrosyne (joy), and Thalia (flowering). Yet it is impossible to directly correlate these mythical figures — or, indeed, the formal qualities of other paintings in which they are represented — to the those of Mrs. Tennent, who, characteristically, has made the scene entirely her own.

Hawaiian Three Graces recalls several other Madge Tennent compositions of this period, such as Three Hawaiian Women (1941; Honolulu Museum of Art) and Three Hawaiians in a Library (1943; Tennent Art Foundation Collection, Isaacs Art Center); these paintings comprise three holoku-clad wahine, presented in three-quarter view, who dominate the canvas. In organizing the figures, she may also have taken direction from Picasso’s Les Trois amies (The Three Friends), a 1927 etching on Japanese paper (Museum of Modern Art). The women gaze in different directions, not one another, yet their forms gracefully overlap. In this painting, however, two other individuals lurk in the distant background: a despondent woman sprawled face-down on the ground (left) and a morose man curled up in a contemplative position (right). A half-eaten apple discarded to the man’s left suggests that these forlorn figures are Adam and Eve, recently expelled from Eden.

Madge Tennent’s jarring juxtaposition of the two disgraced Christian figures with three iconic Greek deities — conjured, expectedly, as buxom wahine — distinguishes this on several levels from any previous depiction of the Graces. On its face, the painting unequivocally reiterates her often-stated belief that the Hawaiians were “descended from the gods of Homer.” The goddesses’ apparent indifference to the biblical reckoning unfolding behind them, however, invokes a secondary (and subversive) resolution, one explicitly charted in the earlier Queen Ka’ahumanu Sunning Herself and The First Hawaiian Bible (both 1938; Tennent Art Foundation, Isaacs Art Center): that Hawaii’s endemic spirit would hold firm against the religious values encroaching from without. In all three paintings, Mrs. Tennent’s Hawaiians are utterly unfazed by Christian interventions, be they Protestant missionaries, enveloping holoku (imposed on Hawaiian women by said missionaries), translated Bibles, or actual Biblical figures. As Jean Charlot once wrote, “Madge Tennent feels content that no preachment ever diminished the carnal reality of her models,” not even the literal presence of Adam and Eve.

The three Hawaiian Graces hold us spellbound in their thrall, at once suspended in that otherworldliness found in Mrs. Tennent’s other works and bearing witness to a foundational narrative at the crux of Christianity. What the artist was trying to communicate through this painting is uncertain — perhaps elevating its overall mystique —, though a comparative reading of it against other works in this vein suggests that it is a particularly incisive extension of her “searching for the spirit of the [Hawaiian] race threading its way undisturbed through the many phases of Hawaiian history,” (Jean Charlot).

* Tennent’s erudite remarks on these and many other artists comprise a 30-page appendix to her autobiography. She channeled her deep knowledge of art history into lectures at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.