What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?
In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin, “Wild Thing,” is the first to appear in English in thirty years—he carried “a hundred meters of canvas, a large collection of paint tubes from Lefranc & Cie, a rifle to shoot the wild game he would eat, a French horn, two mandolins, a guitar, a pile of music by Schubert and Schumann,” and “at least a hundred postcards and photographs that he sometimes called his ‘little friends’ and sometimes his ‘museum of the mind.’ ” These included reproductions of paintings by Degas, Dürer, Raphael, and Manet, and also images of Javanese dancers and the friezes at the temple of Borobudur.
The pictures proved more useful than the rifle. As Gauguin soon discovered, there was little on Tahiti to shoot, or even to pick. Chasing the wild boars that lived on the slopes of the island’s volcanoes required a hunting party. Chickens and goats were privately owned, as were coconut trees. Locals invited Gauguin to share their meals, but he was too proud to accept. In the middle of the South Pacific, he lived off imported corned beef, bought, at great expense, from a Chinese grocery.
In Tahiti, Gauguin hoped to discover an Eden unspoiled by European civilization. Instead, he found a place scarred by the twin imports of disease and colonization. Since Captain Cook had first arrived on the island, in 1769, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and syphilis had shrunk the population from around two hundred thousand to eight thousand. France had claimed the island as a protectorate, in 1842; by the time Gauguin arrived, the bamboo buildings in the capital, Papeete, had been replaced by travesties of brick and iron. Women walked about in full-body shrouds known as “Mother Hubbards,” pressed on them by missionaries. As for Gauguin, he paired a purple suit with a Breton waistcoat and cowboy hat and boots. Because he kept his hair long, the local people thought he was a mahu: a man who lived as a woman. The French thought he was a spy.
Of course, he was an artist. In France, Gauguin had accumulated a small band of acolytes devoted to his iconoclastic paintings saturated with color and symbolism. But fame and fortune eluded him. “I think I shall obtain some well-paid commissions for portraits,” he wrote to his wife from Tahiti. He did get one, for Suzanne Bambridge, the daughter of an English father and a Polynesian mother. Gauguin’s picture shows a doughy-faced woman in her forties dressed in a floral-print Mother Hubbard and gazing intelligently, if warily, out of the frame, her skin tinged green. Her father paid Gauguin two hundred francs and hid the picture in a closet.
Now the portrait hangs in Brussels, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. A painting of two Tahitian women that Gauguin made the following year, “Nafea Faaipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” sold, in 2015, for three hundred million dollars, setting the record at the time for the most money ever paid for a painting. After his death, Gauguin, in the words of his previous English biographer, David Sweetman, was “transformed into an artist-hero” and celebrated, in the popular imagination, as “a mythic figure who devoted himself to immortalizing an innocent native dreamworld.” Since then, though, Gauguin’s reputation has taken a hit. In 2019, the National Gallery mounted a show that encouraged viewers to consider him, as Prideaux recently wrote in the Guardian, as “a French colonist who spread syphilis to underage girls throughout the islands of the South Seas.” (“Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him,” a characteristic sample of wall text read.) An admirer of Gauguin’s art, Prideaux felt that she “couldn’t live in the dishonest and hypocritical position of loving the paintings and hating the man.” She decided to research the matter.
What she found surprised her. In 2000, a glass jar holding four decayed human teeth was discovered in an old well at what had been Gauguin’s final home, on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands. The teeth, subjected to forensic examinations by the Human Genome Project at Cambridge, were determined to be Gauguin’s. Furthermore, they were found to have no trace of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, all contemporary treatments for syphilis. The notion that Gauguin was syphilitic has long been taken for granted, made central to the artist’s legend. “If the story of Gauguin as the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas was not true,” Prideaux asks, “what other myths might we be holding on to?”
Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848. The following year, his parents, Aline and Clovis, took him and his older sister to Le Havre, where they boarded a mercantile ship to embark on a period of self-imposed exile in Peru. Aline was considered a “person of danger” by the French state, thanks to the activities of her own mother, the pioneering feminist and socialist Flora Tristan. Clovis, a journalist, opposed the megalomaniacal ambitions of President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who would soon declare himself Emperor Napoleon III. In South America, Clovis planned to start a republican newspaper with the help of Simón Bolívar, a family friend. This was not to be. When the Gauguins’ ship docked to re-provision in Chile, Clovis, aged thirty-five, suffered a heart attack and died. The next day, the diminished family sailed on for Lima.
The choice of Peru was strategic. Flora Tristan had, in fact, been Flora Tristán-y-Moscosos, a member of a wealthy colonial family in that country which traced its roots to the House of Borgia; Aline intended to petition her great-uncle Don Pío, the family patriarch, for her share of the family fortune. Don Pío had no interest in parting with his money, but he strung the pretty widow along, inviting her and the children to live at his palace. Gauguin thus spent the formative first years of his life ensconced in imperial splendor. His chamber pot was silver; when he went to church, a slave girl carried the rug on which he knelt to pray. At the same time, Lima was rugged, rough. “I still see our street with the chickens pecking at the refuse,” he wrote in his memoirs.
When Gauguin was seven years old, Aline moved the family back to France to live with Clovis’s father, a petit-bourgeois landowner in Orléans. For Paul, this meant culture shock. He spoke Spanish; suddenly, he was thrust into French. He told his snickering classmates that he was “a savage from Peru.” Itching to escape, at seventeen he joined the merchant marine. He was five feet four—his mother and sister called him “Petit Paul”—and a virgin, a condition he made sure to rectify before leaving land. His ship voyaged to India, Brazil, even Tahiti. He docked, too, at Callao, the port serving Lima, but didn’t visit the city. Apparently, the Peru that mattered was the one he carried in his mind.
When he finally blew back ashore, he was twenty-two, with no qualifications and no job, until a family friend set him up in Paris as a futures broker. Incredibly, Gauguin excelled. Prideaux writes that he had a “genius for making money”—a remarkable phrase to come across in a biography of an artist—but his greater reward was a friend: Émile Schuffenecker, a fellow-clerk on the exchange who had a passion for art. Gauguin had been surrounded by art all his life; in Peru, Aline had amassed an extraordinary collection of Moche ceramics. But he had never before shown an interest in making it. Schuff, as he was called, was himself a man of modest talents—he attached himself to Gauguin, Prideaux writes, “like a suckerfish to a whale”—but he took Gauguin to the Louvre to copy Old Masters, and to galleries showing the radical painters who would soon be called the Impressionists. Gauguin produced his own first painting in 1873, a rustic landscape called “Working the Land.” Prideaux judges the sky, laden with thick white clouds, “a disaster.”
He kept at it. In 1876, he had a painting accepted into the Salon, that stolid arbiter of official taste, but his own sympathies lay with the avant-garde. He quickly established himself as a savvy collector, buying works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, Cassatt. By then, he had his own home in which to hang his pictures, and a wife to keep it for him: Mette Gad, a tall, independent-minded Dane. Their first child was born nine months and nine days after their wedding; four more swiftly followed. When Gauguin decided to try his hand at sculpting, he moved his family from the swank Sixteenth Arrondissement to the working-class Vaugirard neighborhood, where studios were big and the rent cheap. He seems to have loved being of two worlds at once, a banker among the artists and an artist among the bankers. On his wall at home, he hung a pair of wooden clogs as a statement of rustic authenticity. At the same time, he took a taxi to work and was rumored to own fourteen pairs of pants.
Gauguin might have gone on leading this bourgeois-bohemian life forever, making more money and more babies, confining his art to evenings and weekends. Then, in 1882, the stock market crashed and he lost his job. Money, and his chronic lack of it, would worry him for the rest of his life. The family moved to Copenhagen to live with Mette’s mother; while Gauguin tried (and failed) to sell tarpaulins, Mette supported them by giving French lessons. Denmark proved as alienating as France had once been. Mette’s family, not thrilled to have their daughter returned to them as a penniless mother of five, called him “the missing link,” a reference to the evolutionary gap between apes and Homo sapiens.
Yet Gauguin believed in himself to an almost deranged degree. Again and again, we find him embarking on some quixotic money-making scheme, assuring Mette with the confidence of a man who has spent all week at the track that his next horse is guaranteed to win. Take the Panama debacle. In 1887, Gauguin set off for Panama City, with the painter Charles Laval, to offer his services to his banker brother-in-law. When the brother-in-law turned out to be merely the proprietor of a general store selling supplies to workers constructing the Panama Canal, Gauguin himself took up a pickaxe and began to dig. Fifteen days later, the Panama Canal Company collapsed. Undaunted, Gauguin and Laval went to the nearby island of Taboga, where they contracted malaria, before sailing to Martinique. Prideaux lists the ailments that afflicted Gauguin there: “Diarrhoea, malarial fevers, vomiting, shaking sweats and chills, muscular pains, and hallucinations.” Laval tried to kill himself. They lived in an abandoned hut, sleeping on seaweed. Gauguin was ecstatic. “I’ve never painted so clearly,” he wrote to Mette.
He believed, unwaveringly, that his art would rescue the family from hardship, and he poured all his energies into it. Early on, Gauguin had taken lessons with Camille Pissarro, the father of the Impressionists, and soon started showing with them. He had his first triumph with “Woman Sewing,” a portrait of a light-dappled nude bent over needle and thread, which he showed at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition, in 1880. The critic Joris-Karl Huysmans celebrated Gauguin’s rendering of his subject’s flesh as “vehemently realistic,” comparing it to the work of Rembrandt. But Gauguin was not ultimately interested in the real. “Precision often destroys the dream,” he thought. He experienced synesthesia, and theorized about ways that he might depict music, which he considered only second in power to painting. (Literature he considered the lowest of the arts—words, so grasping and meagre.) He was voraciously experimental, sponging up techniques and influences while searching for a style of his own. He made marble busts that wouldn’t be out of place in a bourgeois living room, and a series of rough, unruly ceramics based on Moche iconography. He despised Georges Seurat and denigrated the pointillist’s followers as “little green chemists who pile up tiny dots,” which didn’t stop him from trying his own hand at the technique.
The collapse of Gauguin’s fortune and family life freed him to roam. “I have two natures, the savage and sensitive,” he wrote to Mette, in the summer of 1886. “I am putting the sensitive on hold, to enable the savage to advance resolutely, unimpeded.” How daring and Romantic: off again into the wild unknown! Actually, Gauguin was on his way to an inn at Pont-Aven, an artist’s colony in Brittany, where he was provided with two hearty meals a day, plus unlimited cider. Ever on the lookout for versions of the Peruvian Eden from which he had been cast out as a child, Gauguin expected, in Brittany, to encounter Celtic culture in all its untrampled magnificence. What he found instead were foreigners, most of them Americans organizing a baseball game for the Fourth of July.
