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the island as a protectorate, in 1842; by the time Gauguin arrived, the bamboo buildings in the capital, Papeete, had been replaced by travesties of brick and iron.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.
Few of the artists at the inn had seen an Impressionist picture before. They were awed by this gruff, dashing man who painted in “spots of pure color,” and worshipfully declared him their teacher. This made Gauguin feel good. In three months, he produced forty paintings. In “Breton Women Chatting,” you can witness him starting to shed his Impressionist technique and come into his own way of seeing. Four women stop along a wooded path to gossip. Dressed in the traditional Breton costume of black smocks and stiff lace headdresses called coiffes, the figures are clearly delineated, pressed against the leafy backdrop where four white ducks hover in a comic echo of their grouping. There is a stillness to the painting, a declarative, dreamy flatness, as if the women are being remembered rather than observed.
Two years later, when Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven after his stint in Martinique, his transformation was complete. “The Vision After the Sermon,” from 1888, is everything that we imagine a Gauguin picture to be: sharp outlines and stark colors overlaid with a bold, ferocious symbolism. Here, again, are Breton women, gathered around a blood-red ring in which Jacob is grappling with the angel, whose wings are a radiant gold; the viewer, peering over the observers’ shoulders to catch a glimpse of the spectacle, is thrust directly into the action. Gauguin was depicting a “pardon,” an annual wrestling match that melded the Celtic tradition of funeral games with Christian morality. Every year, villagers in Brittany gathered to have their sins forgiven, dance the gavotte, and watch the young townsmen wrestle after denouncing the devil. The victor won a cow, which Gauguin places under a thick tree branch that slashes his picture on the diagonal, dividing the plane of the imagined from that of the real.
The painting is thick with layered meanings. There is the local ritual, with its ancient pagan history; the Biblical allusion; and a deeper, personal testament—the artist wrestling (with himself? the world?) in the act of creation. In Genesis, Jacob tells the angel he will not let him go until he blesses him. That is what Gauguin wanted, too. With the help of one of his acolytes, he proudly carried the painting two and a half miles uphill to offer it to a local church. The priest was baffled. Why were the ordinary women so prominent, the holy scene relegated to the background? He refused the gift.
Wherever Gauguin went, he attracted admirers and antagonists. He had flair. He liked to box and to fence. At Pont-Aven, he took to wearing a beret and jersey like a Breton fisherman; he was, one observer noted, “a fine figure of a man.” He took pains to highlight the sensuality that others never failed to notice in him. Before he travelled to Arles for his infamous two-month stay in Vincent van Gogh’s yellow house, the artists exchanged self-portraits like a betrothed couple. “The hot sexual blood floods the face while the furnace-like colors enveloping the eyes suggest the fire that burns molten in the souls of painters like ourselves” is how Gauguin described his contribution.
Sex is a big part of any accounting of Gauguin’s life and art, not least his own. He called the house he lived in on Hiva Oa—the one where the non-syphilitic teeth were found—the Maison de Jouir: a double entendre meaning both the House of Pleasure and the House of Orgasm. He kept a collection of pornographic postcards over the bed. By then, he was in his fifties, and presented himself as a merrily debauched gone-native type who preferred a pareu, the local loincloth, to pants. When he stumped around the island, it was with the help of a cane that he had carved into the shape of a penis.
It was not always so. Prideaux is careful to point out Gauguin’s early abstemiousness. Yes, as a sailor, he slept around. His connection with Mette was founded on mutual desire; Prideaux informs us, a bit like a Kinsey researcher peering through a two-way mirror, that their sex life was “vigorous and pleasing to them both,” though, after the stock-market crash, Mette refused to touch her husband for fear that she would conceive again. Among Gauguin’s colleagues at the stock exchange, and, later, the frollicking artists at Pont-Aven, he was noted for his fidelity. Two things seem to have changed this: the prolonged separation from Mette—he did eventually impregnate a mistress in Paris—and his relocation to Tahiti.
To the nineteenth-century French mind, Tahiti was a place of unrivalled sexual freedoms. In 1880, a French naval officer who wrote exotic travel novels under the pen name Pierre Loti had published a blockbuster that portrayed the island as a prelapsarian paradise peopled by nubile dancing maidens. Is this what drew Gauguin there? Apparently not. Gauguin initially wanted to go to Tonkin—at the 1889 World’s Fair, he had been bowled over by an exhibit of Khmer art—but his application for a colonial job there was rejected. Next, he chose Madagascar. The friend supposed to accompany him, Émile Bernard, a disciple from Brittany, had come under the influence of Loti and insisted on Tahiti instead, though after their plans were made they had a falling-out. In the end, Gauguin auctioned off thirty of his paintings, made a brief trip to Copenhagen to bid goodbye to the family he had not seen in years, and left alone.
Then came the disappointment of Papeete. To escape its stultifying colonial ethos, Gauguin travelled into the island’s interior. In a town called Faaone, a local greeted him as the “man who makes men”—word of the island’s lone white painter had spread—and invited him into his home. When a woman there asked Gauguin what had brought him their way, he replied, impulsively, that he was looking for a wife. Instantly, she produced her own daughter. In Gauguin’s travelogue “Noa Noa,” first printed in 1901, he recounts his first impression of the girl:
Her name was Tehamana. She is believed to have been thirteen. Gauguin took her to live with him until he returned to France, two years later.
Prideaux writes that Tehamana opened the floodgates of Gauguin’s creativity: “She synthesized his vision of Tahiti.” Between 1891 and 1892, he made more than sixty paintings. He had already begun to immerse himself in what he could find of Tahitian history, mythology, and culture, fusing these influences with his lifelong Peruvian ones. He gave his paintings Tahitian titles like “Matamua (In Olden Times),” putting into them imagined religious totems and women happily unencumbered by the Mother Hubbards of the city. If, in rural Tahiti, he seemed at last to have found the paradise he had lost in Peru, his life with Tehamana now gave him a chance to recover a second one: the domestic happiness that had so fulfilled him before the crash. He was besotted with the daily life of the village where they lived, painting local scenes whose titles he put directly onto the canvas: “Mahana Maa (Saturday)”; “Nafea Faaipoipo (When Will You Marry?)”
Among these paintings, one has long served as a flashpoint for controversy, Exhibit A for the Gauguin-was-a-creep camp. In “Manaò Tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching),” we see a young girl stretched out in bed on her stomach, staring mutely out of the frame. She is naked, her skin a rich brown against the white coverlet. In the midnight-purple background lurks a tupapaú: a malign spirit, whom Gauguin has painted to look like a hooded grim reaper. According to Gauguin, the painting depicts a late-night scene when, arriving home from a trip into town to fetch more lamp oil, he found Tehamana paralyzed on the bed, terrified of the dark. David Sweetman, Gauguin’s previous biographer, thought that it verged on child pornography. Gauguin himself anticipated such a reaction: when he sent the painting to Mette along with other Tahitian works that he hoped would be sold, he told her to fortify herself against the critics who would “bombard you with their malicious questions.” He had been careful not to go over the top, he told her: “a trifle more and she becomes indecent.” He did not mention that the child in the painting was living with him as his wife.
Prideaux takes a gentler view. On the one hand, she says, Gauguin was a man of his time. The age of consent in the French colonies, as in France itself, was thirteen; nothing stopped him, legally or morally, from taking up with a young girl, at home or abroad. Then there was local custom. In Prideaux’s telling, Tahitian girls were offered up as freely and mutely as flowers. Gauguin’s own account makes it seem that Tehamana was pressed upon him as a kind of housewarming gift; it would have been rude to refuse. Prideaux is a sympathetic biographer. She not only admires Gauguin; she likes him, too—sometimes too much (She has an odd habit of using his own poetic writings as factual records.) Even so, she is as much of her own time as Gauguin was of his, and she refers to Tehamana as “doubly a victim”: of her family, who had “trafficked” her “for an advantageous connection,” and of “the lust of a much older European man.”
But Prideaux also believes that Gauguin was something of a feminist, and she makes a surprisingly strong case. He idolized both his rebellious, freethinking grandmother, Flora Tristan, and his tough, pragmatic mother, Aline, after whom he named his only daughter. Though he was tormented by his inability to provide for his family, he was proud of Mette’s self-reliance. These were not merely personal sentiments but part of a greater belief system. Gauguin wrote to Madeleine Bernard, Émile’s seventeen-year-old sister, advising her to “find happiness solely in your independence and your conscience”; the key, he told her, was earning money of her own, so she would never have to rely on a man.
Later, Gauguin extended the principle of equality between the sexes to sex itself, writing that woman “has the right to love whomever she pleases.” When they first met, Gauguin sent Tehamana home for a week, telling her to return only of her own free will. On another occasion, Gauguin returned from a fishing expedition to discover that Tehamana had been unfaithful to him; when she begged for him to strike her, he kissed her instead. Still, when he writes, in “Noa Noa,” that Tehamana’s “pretty, sensual, and tender mouth warned me that the real dangers of the adventure would be for me, not for her,” the reader recoils at the predatory cliché.
The pictures themselves tell a subtler story. The women that Gauguin painted in Brittany are sociological specimens, not individuals. You can barely make out their features. The Tehamana paintings, on the other hand, are radiant with tenderness and personality. Look at “Merahi Metua No Tehamana (Tehamana Has Many Parents),” from 1893. Tehamana poses in a blue-and-white striped Mother Hubbard, holding a lace fan as if she has just come from church; white flowers stud her hair. On the wall behind her, Gauguin has painted glyphs like those discovered on Easter Island, and a masked female figure, ferocious and bare-breasted. The overt themes of the painting, the conflict between European civilization and the local traditions it smothered, are familiar territory for Gauguin. But Tehamana seems to emerge from the symbolic background, to escape from Gauguin’s dreamworld into her own real one. There is a softness to her, a hint of slyness. A smile plays faintly across her face, while her intelligent gaze drifts away from the viewer toward some hidden, private place that only she can see.
The other major moral charge against Gauguin, that he was a colonialist, is easier to answer. Gauguin hated authority on principle. For the duration of his time in Polynesia—in Tahiti between 1891 and 1893; back again in 1895, after returning to Paris to try to take advantage of his burgeoning reputation; and finally to Hiva Oa, in 1901—he was a thorn in the side of the colonial administration, constantly feuding with this or that official. He earned notoriety as a political satirist for a Tahitian newspaper and advocated for the locals on issues such as unfair taxation and the corruption of the colonial gendarmes. In Hiva Oa, children were forced to go to Catholic boarding schools that snuffed out native tradition, language, and beliefs. Outraged, Gauguin located an obscure French law that proved only children within a four-kilometre radius of a school were bound to attend. Parents moved their children safely out of reach. One father was so delighted not to have to send his fourteen-year-old daughter to the dreaded school that he sent her to live with Gauguin instead.
One particular enemy of Gauguin’s was Bishop Martin, a Catholic priest on Hiva Oa who did his best to stomp out local custom, forbidding tattooing, Polynesian dancing, and the customary practice of polyandry. Gauguin made a wood carving of Martin that he called “Père Paillard”—Father Lechery—and one of a married woman known to be the cleric’s mistress. He gave Père Paillard the horns of a devil, or a cuckold, and set the figures on either side of the staircase leading to the bedroom at the Maison de Jouir.
What Gauguin despised was the misapplication of religion, not religion itself. As an adolescent in Orléans, he had spent a foundational period at a Catholic academy run by a certain Monseigneur Dupanloup, a remarkably progressive priest interested in reconciling religion and science. Religion is everywhere in Gauguin’s paintings. “Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary),” from 1891, shows Mary as a Tahitian woman, carrying the baby Jesus on her shoulder, as local mothers carried their babies. In Europe, the painting was received as a blasphemous shock. Naturally, Gauguin doubled down. His Tahitian masterpiece, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1897-8), is a history of mankind from Eden to the fall, painted with exclusively Tahitian figures and named for three questions from a catechism that Monseigneur Dupanloup had composed to help students respond to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
To this particular brand of Christianity Gauguin married a sui-generis take on Polynesian religion. When he arrived in Tahiti, he believed that he would find a rich tradition of native art that he could study to inform his own. It turned out that no such thing existed. The French had destroyed all trace of totems and iconography associated with the old religion. If Gauguin wanted to depict the Polynesian past, he would have to imagine it for himself. He became obsessed with Oviri, the Tahitian goddess of mourning, a ferocious, filicidal figure whose powerful memory the missionaries had failed to entirely erase. Locals still worshipped her in secret; Gauguin decided to sculpt his own vision of her likeness. Nearly thirty inches tall, made from a dull, reddish, unglazed ceramic, Gauguin’s Oviri is a kind of golem. Her froglike eyes stand far apart on her expressionless face; her feet perch on the snarling severed head of a wolf. She is naked, sexed and sexless, terrifying in her stillness. Gauguin saw her as an alter ego. He told a friend that the sculpture’s theme was “life in death and death in life.”
On this subject, he had come to know a fair amount. In 1896, when he was forty-seven, a letter from Mette informed him that Aline, his daughter and his favorite child, had died at the age of nineteen from pneumonia. Meanwhile, he had found happiness with another Tahitian fourteen-year-old, Pahura, and, when she became pregnant, made a glowing series of paintings celebrating domestic happiness. Their daughter died a few days after she was born, at Christmastime. Gauguin may not have had syphilis, but he was rife with other ailments. On his trip back to France, he had made a stop in a part of Brittany much harsher than the friendly Pont-Aven, and had got into an altercation with locals, who had kicked him nearly to death. He survived, but his leg never healed properly; its wounds oozed pus. He had eye problems, terrible eczema, a series of heart attacks. In early 1897, he tried to poison himself.
Then his luck changed. Pahura gave birth to a boy. Gauguin got some money from sales of his paintings in France, though it soon ran out. Sick of his struggles, and of Tahiti itself, he set out, alone, for the Marquesas. “I believe that there, in savage surroundings, complete solitude will revive in me before I die,” he wrote. In fact, this seems to have been one of the more happily social times of his life. He had finally learned enough about island life to live off the land. Each morning, he bathed in a stream, then painted till eleven. In the evening, he hosted gatherings that included conversation, music-making, and the Polynesian dancing outlawed by Bishop Martin. He played the harmonium and worked on his memoirs. “I’d like to be a pig,” he wrote. “Man alone can be ridiculous.”
In 1902, he wrote to his art dealer, Georges Daniel de Monfreid, that he was ready to go to Spain: “The bulls, the Spaniards, their hair plastered with lard, all that has been done, overdone, but I see them differently.” Don’t you dare move, de Monfried replied. A legend was growing around the man in Oceania. “Simply stated, you are blessed with the immunity of the dead and famous, you have passed into art history.”
A few months later, Gauguin made a self-portrait that Prideaux compares to those painted on Greco-Roman mummies. The famous long hair is shorn short; he wears a pair of thinly rimmed glasses and gazes out, calmly, at whatever is coming next. On May 8th, a friend passed by his house and called out a greeting. When he got no response, he went into the Maison de Jouir and found Gauguin on the edge of the bed, one leg stretched toward the floor. He had passed into art history for good. ♦
