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The title of Paul Gauguin’s 1893-94 portrait Annah La Javanaise Aita tamari vahine Judith te parari has two parts, describing its subject in two different languages: literally, ‘Annah the Javanese [in French] The childwoman (sometimes child-girl) Judith has not been breached [in Tahitian]’ Relatively little is known of the real young person or people who inspired the painting The instances in which people – whether art historians, the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, or writers of art institution copy – have written of Annah contradict each other often, offering up vague and conflicting details of a supposedly insignificant life Annah’s ethnicity shifts, her origin ranges from ‘streets’ to ‘brothels’; I have seen the exact same picture of a girl labelled ‘Annah La Javanaise’ also labelled as ‘Teha’amana’, a Polynesian teenager who’d been married to Gauguin There is so much variation in accounts of her life that it’s plausible multiple brown children could have been mistaken for one For that matter, it’s possible that Annah was trans or of a non-Western gender, though presenting as a girl (and thus possibly desirous of ‘they’ as their pronoun in English) These children exist in the archives as an afterthought, an appendage to a coterie of white, European, male painters in late-nineteenth century France, primarily Paul Gauguin   I first learned of Annah La Javanaise in 2011 Today it is held in a private collection, inaccessible to the general public except when loaned out to museum exhibitions I discovered its existence online, and thus experienced it, as most people now do, as a series of pixels on a screen, a digital ghost of an artwork whose original form exists exclusively for its wealthy owners My first thought upon seeing the picture was that it showed a Javanese girl like myself; a body presenting and labelled as a Javanese woman – though in photographs in the Gauguin archives, a similar-looking girl certainly presents as a child – documented abroad in the nineteenth century, captured in both painted and photographic form This is rare to see At that time, I had begun to think increasingly about