A pale horse bends to drink from a stream in a Tahitian landscape, while two riders pass among the trees behind. The horse is not really white: its coat takes on the green of the plants around it, which gives the picture its title. Paul Gauguin painted it in 1898, during his second stay in Tahiti, as an imagined rather than observed landscape of twisting branches, lilies and invented flowers. The pharmacist who commissioned it turned it down, because he thought the horse was too green.

The horse may echo Tahitian beliefs about the soul's passage to another world. The painting entered the French national collections in 1927. It is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.