Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French post-Impressionist artist. Underappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Gauguin's art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career, as well as assisting in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris.Many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin and other important collections.
He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with color led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.
Biography
Family history and early life
Aline Marie Chazal Tristán, (1825-1867) "The Artist's Mother", 1889, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan (1803-1844) in 1838
Gauguin was born in Paris, France to Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal on June 7, 1848. His birth coincided with revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe that year. His father, a 34-year-old liberal journalist, came from a family of petit-bourgeoisie entrepreneurs residing in Orléans.He was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities.Gauguin's mother, the 22-year-old Aline Marie Chazal, was the daughter of Andre Chazal, an engraver, and Flora Tristan, an author and activist in early socialist movements. Their union ended when Andre assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder.
Paul Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the illegitimate daughter of Thérèse Laisnay and Don Mariano de Tristan Moscoso. Details of Thérèse's family background are not known; her father, Don Mariano, was a Spanish nobleman and an officer of the Dragoons.Members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru.Nonetheless, Don Mariano's unexpected death plunged his mistress and daughter Flora into poverty.When Flora's marriage with Andre failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her father's Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune. This never materialized; but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in 1838. An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguin's maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutionary movements. Placed under surveillance by French art and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844.Her grandson Paul "idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life."
In 1850, Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Alina and young children in hopes of continuing his journalistic career under the auspices of his wife's South American relations.He died of a heart attack en route, and Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2 ½ year-old sister, Marie. Gauguin's mother was welcomed by her paternal granduncle, whose son-in-law would shortly assume the presidency of Peru.To the age of six, Paul enjoyed a privileged upbringing, attended by nursemaids and servants. He retained a vivid memory of that period of his childhood which instilled "indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life."
Gauguin's idyllic childhood in this "tropical paradise" ended abruptly when his family mentors fell from political power during Peruvian civil conflicts in 1854. Aline returned to France with her children, leaving Paul with his paternal grandfather, Guillaume Gauguin, in Orleans. Deprived by the Peruvian Tristan Moscoso clan of a generous annuity arranged by her granduncle, Alina settled in Paris to work as a dressmaker.
Education and first job
After attending a couple of local schools, Gauguin was sent to the prestigious Catholic boarding school Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin.He spent three years at the school. At age fourteen, he entered the Loriol Institute in Paris, a naval preparatory school, before returning to Orléans to take his final year at the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc. Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine. Three years later, he joined the French navy in which he served for two years.His mother died on 7 July 1867, but he did not learn of it for several months until a letter from his sister Marie caught up with him in India.
In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. A close family friend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse; Gauguin was 23. He became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for the next 11 years. In 1879 he was earning 30,000 francs a year (about $125,000 in 2008 US dollars) as a stockbroker, and as much again in his dealings in the art market. But in 1882 the Paris stock market crashed and the art market contracted. Gauguin's earnings deteriorated sharply and he eventually decided to pursue painting full-time.
Marriage
In 1873, he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad (1850–1920). Over the next ten years, they had five children: Émile (1874–1955); Aline (1877–1897); Clovis (1879–1900); Jean René (1881–1961); and Paul Rollon (1883–1961). By 1884, Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he pursued a business career as a tarpaulin salesman. It was not a success: He could not speak Danish, and the Danes did not want French tarpaulins. Mette became the chief breadwinner, giving French lessons to trainee diplomats.
His middle-class family and marriage fell apart after 11 years when Gauguin was driven to paint full-time. He returned to Paris in 1885, after his wife and her family asked him to leave because he had renounced the values they shared.Gauguin's last physical contact with them was in 1891, Mette eventually breaking with him decisively in 1894.
First paintings
Study of a Nude (Suzanne sewing), 1880, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
In 1873, around the same time as he became a stockbroker, Gauguin began painting in his free time. His Parisian life centred on the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Gauguin lived at 15, rue la Bruyère.Nearby were the cafés frequented by the Impressionists. Gauguin also visited galleries frequently and purchased work by emerging artists. He formed a friendship with Camille Pissarro and visited him on Sundays to paint in his garden. Pissarro introduced him to various other artists. In 1877 Gauguin "moved downmarket and across the river to the poorer, newer, urban sprawls" of Vaugirard. Here, on the third floor at 8 rue Carcel, he had the first home in which he had a studio. His close friend Émile Schuffenecker, a former stockbroker who also aspired to become an artist, lived close by. Gauguin showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882 – (earlier a sculpture, of his son Émile, had been the only sculpture in the 4th Impressionist Exhibition of 1879.) His paintings received dismissive reviews, although several of them, such as The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, are now highly regarded.
In 1882, the stock market crashed and the art market contracted. Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists' primary art dealer, was especially affected by the crash and for a period of time stopped buying pictures from painters such as Gauguin. Gauguin's earnings contracted sharply and over the next two years he slowly formulated his plans to become a full-time artist.The following two summers, he painted with Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne. In October 1883, he wrote to Pissarro saying that he had decided to make his living from painting at all cost and asked for his help, which Pissarro at first readily provided. The following January, Gauguin moved with his family to Rouen, where they could live more cheaply and where he thought he had discerned opportunities when visiting Pissarro there the previous summer. However, the venture proved unsuccessful, and by the end of the year Mette returned to Copenhagen, Gauguin following shortly after in November 1884, bringing with him his art collection, which subsequently remained in Copenhagen.
Life in Copenhagen proved equally difficult and their marriage grew strained. At Mette's urging, supported by her family, Gauguin returned to Paris the following year.
The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, 1879, Smith College Museum of Art
Winter Landscape, 1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Portrait of Madame Gauguin, c. 1880–81, Foundation E.G. Bührle, Zürich
Garden in Vaugirard (Painter's Family in the Garden in Rue Carcel), 1881, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
France 1885–86
Four Breton Women, 1886, Neue Pinakothek, art
Gauguin returned to Paris in June 1885, accompanied by his six-year-old son Clovis. The other children remained with Mette in Copenhagen, where they had the support of family and friends while Mette herself was able to get work as a translator and French teacher. Gauguin initially found it difficult to re-enter the art world in Paris and spent his first winter back in real poverty, obliged to take a series of menial jobs. Clovis eventually fell ill and was sent to a boarding school, Gauguin's sister Marie providing the funds. During this first year, he produced very little art. He exhibited nineteen paintings and a wood relief at the eighth (and last) Impressionist exhibition in May 1886. Most of these paintings were earlier work from Rouen or Copenhagen and there was nothing really novel in the few new ones, although his Baigneuses à Dieppe ("Women Bathing") introduced what was to become a recurring motif, the woman in the waves. Nevertheless, Félix Bracquemond did purchase one of his paintings. This exhibition also established Georges Seurat as leader of the avant-garde movement in Paris. Gauguin contemptuously rejected Seurat's Neo-Impressionist Pointillist technique and later in the year broke decisively with Pissarro, who from that point on was rather antagonistic towards Gauguin.
Gauguin spent the summer of 1886 in the artist's colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. He was attracted in the first place because it was cheap to live there. However, he found himself an unexpected success with the young art students who flocked there in the summer. His naturally pugilistic temperament (he was both an accomplished boxer and fencer) was no impediment in the socially relaxed seaside resort. He was remembered during that period as much for his outlandish appearance as for his art. Amongst these new associates was Charles Laval, who accompanied Gauguin the following year to Panama and Martinique.
That summer, he executed some pastel drawings of nude figures in the manner of Pissarro and those by Degas exhibited at the 1886 eighth Impressionist exhibition. He mainly painted landscapes such as La Bergère Bretonne ("The Breton Shepherdess"), in which the figure plays a subordinate role. His Jeunes Bretons au bain ("Young Breton Boys Bathing"), introducing a theme he returned to each time he visited Pont-Aven, is clearly indebted to Degas in its design and bold use of pure color. The naive drawings of the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, used to illustrate a popular guide-book on Brittany, had caught the imagination of the avant-garde student artists at Pont-Aven, anxious to free themselves from the conservatism of their academies, and Gauguin consciously imitated them in his sketches of Breton girls.These sketches were later worked up into paintings back in his Paris studio. The most important of these is Four Breton Women, which shows a marked departure from his earlier Impressionist style as well as incorporating something of the naive quality of Caldecott's illustration, exaggerating features to the point of caricature.
Gauguin, along with Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Émile Schuffenecker and many others, re-visited Pont-Aven after his travels in Panama and Martinique. The bold use of pure color and Symbolist choice of subject matter distinguish what is now called the Pont-Aven School. Disappointed with Impressionism, Gauguin felt that traditional European painting had become too imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigour. There was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan (Japonism). He was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX.
Women Bathing, 1885, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
La Bergère Bretonne, 1886, Laing Art Gallery
Breton Girl, 1886, Burrell Collection, Glasgow
Breton Bather, 1886, Art Institute of Chicago
Cloisonnism and synthetism
Poster of the 1889 Exhibition of Paintings by the Impressionist and Synthetist Group, at Café des Arts, known as the The Volpini Exhibition, 1889.
Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin's work evolved towards Cloisonnism, a style given its name by the critic Édouard Dujardin in response to Émile Bernard's method of painting with flat areas of color and bold outlines, which reminded Dujardin of the Medieval cloisonné enameling technique. Gauguin was very appreciative of Bernard's art and of his daring with the employment of a style which suited Gauguin in his quest to express the essence of the objects in his art. In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist work, the image was reduced to areas of pure color separated by heavy black outlines. In such works Gauguin paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of color, thereby dispensing with the two most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. His painting later evolved towards Synthetism in which neither form nor color predominate but each has an equal role.
The Yellow Christ (Le Christ jaune), 1889, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
Still Life with Profile of Laval, 1886, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Martinique
Martinique Landscape 1887, Scottish National Gallery
In 1887, after visiting Panama, Gauguin spent several months near Saint Pierre in Martinique, accompanied by his friend the artist Charles Laval. Paul Gauguin spent approximately 6 months on the island of Martinique in June to November 1887. His thoughts and experiences during this time are recorded in his letters to his wife Mette and his artist friend Emile Schuffenecker. He arrived in Martinique by way of Panama where he had found himself broke and without a job. At the time France had a policy of repatriation where if a art became broke or stranded on a French colony, the state would pay for the boat ride back. Upon leaving Panama protected by the repatriation policy, Gauguin and Laval decided to get off the boat at the Martinique port of St. Pierre. Scholars are in disagreement if Gauguin intentionally or spontaneously decided to stay on the island. At first, the 'negro hut' in which they lived suited him, and he enjoyed watching people in their daily activities.However, the weather in the summer was hot and the hut leaked in the rain. Gauguin also suffered dysentery and marsh fever. While in Martinique, he produced between 10 and 20 works (12 being the most common estimate), traveled widely and apparently came into contact with a small community of Indian immigrants; a contact that would later influence his art through the incorporation of Indian symbols. During his stay, the writer Lafcadio Hearn was also on the island. His account provides an historical comparison to accompany Gauguin's images.
Gauguin finished 11 known paintings during his stay in Martinique, many of which seem to be derived from his hut. His letters to Schuffenecker express an excitement about the exotic location and natives represented in his paintings. Gauguin asserted that four of his paintings on the island were better than the rest.The works as a whole are brightly colored, loosely painted, outdoor figural scenes. Even though his time on the island was short, it surely was influential. He recycled some of his figures and sketches in later paintings, like the motif in Among the Mangoes[53] which is replicated on his fans. Rural and indigenous populations remained a popular subject in Gauguin's work after he left the island.
Huttes sous les arbres, 1887, Private collection, Washington
Bord de Mer II, 1887, Private collection, Paris
At the Pond, 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Conversation Tropiques (Négresses Causant), 1887, Private collection, Dallas
Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Gauguin and Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Gauguin's Martinique paintings were exhibited at his color merchant Arsène Poitier's gallery. There they were seen and admired by Vincent van Gogh and his art dealer brother Theo van Gogh, whose firm Goupil & Cie had dealings with Portier. Theo purchased three of Gauguin's paintings for 900 francs and arranged to have them hung at Goupil's, thus introducing Gauguin to wealthy clients. At the same time Vincent and Gauguin became close friends (on van Gogh's part it amounted to something akin to adulation) and they corresponded together on art, a correspondence that was instrumental in Gauguin formulating his philosophy of art. The arrangement with Goupil's continued past Theo's death in January 1891.
Gauguin's relationship with Vincent proved fraught. In 1888, at Theo's instigation, Gauguin and Vincent spent nine weeks painting together at Vincent's Yellow House in Arles. Their relationship deteriorated and eventually Gauguin decided to leave. On the evening of 23 December 1888 according to a much later account of Gauguin's, van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. Later the same evening, Van Gogh cut off his left ear.He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and handed it to a domestic worker who was his friend, and asked her to "keep this object carefully, in remembrance of me." Van Gogh was hospitalized the following day and Gauguin left Arles.They never saw each other again, but they continued to correspond and in 1890 Gauguin went so far as to propose they form an artist studio in Antwerp. An 1889 sculptural self-portrait Jug in the form of a Head, Self-portrait appears to reference Gauguin's traumatic relationship with van Gogh.
Gauguin later claimed to have been instrumental in influencing van Gogh's development as a painter at Arles. While van Gogh did briefly experiment with Gauguin's art of painting from the imagination in paintings such as Memory of the Garden at Etten, it did not suit him and he quickly returned to painting from nature.
Gauguin and Degas[
Riders on the Beach, 1902, Museum Folkwang
Valérie Roumi, 1880, carved and painted mahogany, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Although Gauguin made some of his early strides in the world of art under Pissarro, Edgar Degas was Gauguin's most admired contemporary artist and a great influence on his work from the beginning, with his figures and interiors as well as a carved and painted medallion of singer Valérie Roumi. He had a deep reverence for Degas' artistic dignity and tact.It was Gauguin's healthiest, longest lasting friendship, spanning his entire artistic career until his death.
In addition to being one of his earliest supporters, including buying Gauguin's work and persuading dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to do the same, there was never a public support for Gauguin more unwavering than from Degas. Gauguin also purchased work from Degas in the early to mid-1870s and his own monotyping predilection was probably influenced by Degas' advancements in the medium.[66] Gauguin's Durand-Ruel exhibition in November 1893, which Degas chiefly organized, received mixed reviews. Among the mocking were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and former friend Pissarro. Degas, however, praised his work, purchasing Te faaturuma (es) and admiring the exotic sumptuousness of Gauguin's conjured folklore.In appreciation, Gauguin presented Degas with The Moon and the Earth, one of the exhibited paintings that had attracted the most hostile criticism. Gauguin's late canvas Riders on the Beach (two versions) recalls Degas' horse pictures which he started in the 1860s, specifically Racetrack and Before the Race, testifying to his enduring effect on Gauguin. Degas later purchased two paintings at Gauguin's 1895 auction to raise funds for his final trip to Tahiti. These were Vahine no te vi (Woman with a Mango) and Gauguin's copy of Manet's Olympia.
First visit to Tahiti
By 1890, Gauguin had conceived the project of making Tahiti his next artistic destination. A successful auction of paintings in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1891, along with other events such as a banquet and a art concert, provided the necessary funds.The auction had been greatly helped by a flattering review from Octave Mirbeau, courted by Gauguin through Camille Pissarro.[a] After visiting his wife and children in Copenhagen, for what turned out to be the last time, Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on 1 April 1891, promising to return a rich man and make a fresh start. His avowed intent was to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional".Nevertheless, he took care to take with him a collection of visual stimuli in the form of photographs, drawings and prints.
He spent the first three months in Papeete, the capital of the colony and already much influenced by French and European culture. His biographer Belinda Thomson observes that he must have been disappointed in his vision of a primitive idyll. He was unable to afford the pleasure-seeking life-style in Papeete, and an early attempt at a portrait, Suzanne Bambridge (fr), was not well liked. He decided to set up his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, some forty-five kilometres from Papeete, installing himself in a native-style bamboo hut. Here he executed paintings depicting Tahitian life such as Fatata te Miti (By the Sea) and Ia Orana Maria (ca) (Ave Maria), the latter to become his most prized Tahitian painting.
Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Many of his finest paintings date from this period. His first portrait of a Tahitian model is thought to be Vahine no te tiare (ca) (Woman with a Flower). The painting is notable for the care with which it delineates Polynesian features. He sent the painting to his patron George-Daniel de Monfreid, a friend of Schuffenecker, who was to become Gauguin's devoted art in Tahiti. By late summer 1892 this painting was being displayed at Goupil's gallery in Paris.Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews believes that Gauguin's encounter with exotic sensuality in Tahiti, so evident in the painting, was by far the most important aspect of his sojourn there.
Gauguin was lent copies of Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's (fr) 1837 Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan and Edmond de Bovis' (fr) 1855 État de la société tahitienne à l'arrivée des Européens, containing full accounts of Tahiti's forgotten culture and art. He was fascinated by the accounts of Arioi society and their god 'Oro. Because these accounts contained no illustrations and the Tahitian models were in any case long disappeared, he could give free rein to his imagination. He executed some twenty paintings and a dozen woodcarvings over the next year. The first of these was Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), representing Oro's terrestrial wife Vairaumati, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His illustrated notebook of the time, Ancien Culte Mahorie (it), is preserved in the Louvre and was published in facsimile form in 1951.
In all, Gauguin sent nine of his paintings to Monfreid in Paris. These were eventually exhibited in Copenhagen in a joint exhibition with the late Vincent van Gogh. Reports that they had been well received (though in fact only two of the Tahitian paintings were sold and his earlier paintings were unfavourably compared with van Gogh's) were sufficiently encouraging for Gauguin to contemplate returning with some seventy others he had completed.He had in any case largely run out of funds, depending on a state grant for a free passage home. In addition he had some health problems diagnosed as heart problems by the local doctor, which Mathews suggests may have been the early signs of cardiovascular syphilis.
Gauguin later wrote a travelogue (first published 1901) titled Noa Noa (ca), originally conceived as commentary on his paintings and describing his experiences in Tahiti. Modern critics have suggested that the contents of the book were in part fantasized and plagiarized. In it he revealed that he had at this time taken a thirteen-year-old girl as native wife or vahine (the Tahitian word for "woman"), a marriage contracted in the course of a single afternoon. This was Teha'amana, called Tehura in the travelogue, who was pregnant by him by the end of summer 1892.Teha'amana was the subject of several of Gauguin's paintings, including Merahi metua no Tehamana and the celebrated Spirit of the Dead Watching, as well as a notable woodcarving Tehura now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Page from Gauguin's notebook (date unknown), Ancien Culte Mahorie. Louvre
Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), 1892, Museum of Modern Art
Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Tehura (Teha'amana), 1891-3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Return to France
Gauguin, c. 1895, playing a harmonium at Alphonse Mucha's studio at rue de la Grande-Chaumière, Paris (Mucha photo)
Paul Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x 27 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. "The theme of Oviri is death, savagery, wildness. Oviri stands over a dead she-wolf, while crushing the life out of her cub." Perhaps, as Gauguin wrote to Odilon Redon, it is a matter of "not death in life but life in death".
In August 1893, Gauguin returned to France, where he continued to execute paintings on Tahitian subjects such as Mahana no atua (it) (Day of the God) and Nave nave moe (pl) (Sacred spring, sweet dreams).An exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in November 1894 was a moderate success, selling at quite elevated prices eleven of the forty paintings exhibited. He set up an apartment at 6 rue Vercingétorix on the edge of the Montparnasse district frequented by artists, and began to conduct a weekly salon. He affected an exotic persona, dressing in Polynesian costume, and conducted a public affair with a young woman still in her teens, "half Indian, half Malayan", known as Annah the Javanese (ca).
Despite the moderate success of his November exhibition, he subsequently lost Durand-Ruel's patronage in circumstances that are not clear. Mathews characterises this as a tragedy for Gauguin's career. Amongst other things he lost the chance of an introduction to the American market.The start of 1894 found him preparing woodcuts using an experimental technique for his proposed travelogue Noa Noa. He returned to Pont-Aven for the summer. The following year he attempted an auction of his paintings in Paris, similar to the one he had held in 1891, but this was not a success. The dealer Ambroise Vollard, however, showed his paintings at his gallery in March 1895, but they unfortunately did not come to terms at that date.
He submitted a large ceramic sculpture he called Oviri he had fired the previous winter to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts 1895 salon opening in April.There are conflicting versions of how it was received: his biographer and Noa Noa collaborator, the Symbolist poet Charles Morice (fr), contended( 1920) the work was "literally expelled" from the exhibition, while Vollard said (1937) the work was only admitted when Chaplet threatened to withdraw all his own work.In any case, Gauguin took the opportunity to increase his public exposure by writing an outraged letter on the state of modern ceramics to Le Soir.
By this time it had become clear that he and his wife Mette were irrevocably separated. Although there had been hopes of a reconciliation, they had quickly quarrelled over money matters and neither visited the other. Gauguin initially refused to share any part of a 13,000-franc art from his uncle Isidore he had come into shortly after returning. Mette was eventually gifted 1,500 francs, but she was outraged and from that point on kept in contact with him only through Schuffenhecker, doubly galling for Gauguin as his friends thus knew the true extent of his betrayal.
Nave nave moe (Sacred spring, sweet dreams), 1894, Hermitage Museum
Annah the Javanese, (1893), Private collection
Paul Gauguin, Alfons Mucha, Luděk Marold, and Annah the Javanese at Mucha's studio, 1893
Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful Land), woodcut in Noa Noa series, 1894, Art Gallery of Ontario
Residence in Tahiti
Jules Agostini's 1896 photograph of Gauguin's house in Punaauia. Note the sculpture of a nude woman.
Gauguin set out for Tahiti again on 28 June 1895. His return is characterised by Thomson as an essentially negative one, his disillusionment with the Paris art scene compounded by two attacks on him in the same issue of Mercure de France; one by Emile Bernard, the other by Camille Mauclair. Mathews remarks that his isolation in Paris had become so bitter that he had no choice but to try to reclaim his place in Tahiti society.
He arrived in September 1895 and was to spend the next six years living, for the most part, an apparently comfortable life as an artist-colon near, or at times in, Papeete. During this time he was able to support himself with an increasingly steady stream of sales and the support of friends and well-wishers, though there was a period of time 1898–1899 when he felt compelled to take a desk job in Papeete, of which there is not much record. He built a spacious reed and thatch house at Punaauia in an affluent area ten miles east of Papeete, settled by wealthy families, in which he installed a large studio, sparing no expense. Jules Agostini, an acquaintance of Gauguin's and an accomplished amateur photographer, photographed the house in 1896. Later a sale of land obliged him to build a new one in the same neighbourhood.
He maintained a horse and trap, so was in a position to travel daily to Papeete to participate in the social life of the colony should he wish. He subscribed to the Mercure de France (indeed was a shareholder), by then France's foremost critical journal, and kept up an active correspondence with fellow artists, dealers, critics, and patrons in Paris.During his year in Papeete and thereafter, he played an increasing role in local politics, contributing abrasively to a local journal opposed to the colonial government, Les Guêpes (The Wasps), that had recently been formed, and eventually edited his own monthly publication Le Sourire: Journal sérieux (The Smile: A Serious Newspaper), later titled simply Journal méchant (A Wicked Newspaper).A certain amount of artwork and woodcuts from his newspaper survive. In February 1900 he became the editor of Les Guêpes itself, for which he drew a salary, and he continued as editor until he left Tahiti in September 1901. The paper under his editorship was noted for its scurrilous attacks on the governor and officialdom in general, but was not in fact a art of native causes, although perceived as such nevertheless.
For the first year at least he produced no paintings, informing Monfreid that he proposed henceforth to concentrate on sculpture. Few of his wooden carvings from this period survive, most of them collected by Monfreid. Thomson cites Oyez Hui Iesu (Christ on the Cross), a wooden cylinder half a metre tall featuring a curious art of religious motifs. The cylinder may have been inspired by similar symbolic carvings in Brittany, such as at Pleumeur-Bodou, where ancient menhirs have been Christianised by local craftsmen. When he resumed painting, it was to continue his long-standing series of sexually charged nudes in paintings such as Te tamari no atua (Son of God) and O Taiti (Nevermore). Thomson observes a progression in complexity. Mathews notes a return to Christian symbolism that would have endeared him to the colonists of the time, now anxious to preserve what was left of native culture by stressing the universality of religious principles. In these paintings, Gauguin was addressing an audience amongst his fellow colonists in Papeete, not his former avant-garde audience in Paris.
His health took a decided turn for the worse and he was hospitalised several times for a variety of ailments. While he was in France, he had his ankle shattered in a drunken brawl on a seaside visit to Concarneau. The injury, an open fracture, never healed properly. Now painful and debilitating sores that restricted his movement were erupting up and down his legs. These were treated with arsenic. Gauguin blamed the tropical climate and described the sores as "eczema", but his biographers agree this must have been the progress of syphilis.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
In April 1897 he received word that his favourite daughter Aline had died tragically from pneumonia. This was also the month he learned he had to vacate his house because its land had been sold. He took out a bank loan to build a much more extravagant wooden house with beautiful views of the mountains and sea. But he overextended himself in so doing, and by the end of the year faced the real prospect of his bank foreclosing on him.Failing health and pressing debts brought him to the brink of despair. At the end of the year he completed his monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which he regarded as his masterpiece and final artistic testament (in a letter to Monfreid he explained that he tried to kill himself after finishing it).The painting was exhibited at Vollard's gallery in November the following year, along with eight thematically related paintings he had completed by July. This was his first major exhibition in Paris since his Durand-Ruel show in 1893 and it was a decided success, critics praising his new serenity. Where do we come from?, however, received mixed reviews and Vollard had difficulty selling it. He eventually sold it in 1901 for 2,500 francs (about $10,000 in year 2000 US dollars) to Gabriel Frizeau (fr), of which Vollard's commission was perhaps as much as 500 francs.
Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit, traced monotype, 1899/1900, Städel
Georges Chaudet, Gauguin's Paris dealer, died in the fall of 1899. Vollard had been buying Gauguin's paintings through Chaudet and now made an agreement with Gauguin directly.The agreement provided Gauguin a regular monthly advance of 300 francs against a guaranteed purchase of at least 25 unseen paintings a year at 200 francs each, and in addition Vollard undertook to provide him with his art materials. There were some initial problems on both sides, but Gauguin was finally able to realise his long cherished plan of resettling in the Marquesas Islands in search of a yet more primitive society. He spent his final months in Tahiti living in considerable comfort, as attested by the liberality with which he entertained his friends at that time.
Gauguin was unable to continue his work in ceramics in the islands for the simple reason that suitable clay was not available.[138] Similarly, without access to a printing press (Le Sourire was hectographed),he was obliged to turn to the monotype process in his graphic work.Surviving examples of these prints are rather rare and command very high prices in the saleroom.
Gauguin's vahine during all this time was Pahura (Pau'ura) a Tai, the daughter of neighbours in Punaauia and aged fourteen and a half when he took her in.She gave him two children, of which a daughter died in infancy. The other, a boy, she raised herself. His descendants still arted Tahiti at the time of Mathews' biography. Paa'ura refused to accompany Gauguin to the Marquesas away from her family in Punaauia (earlier she had left him when he took work in Papeete just 10 miles away). When the English writer Willam Somerset Maugham visited her in 1917, she could offer him no useful memory of Gauguin and chided him for visiting her without bringing money from Gauguin's family.
Oyez Hui Iesu (Christ on the Cross), rubbing (reverse print) from an 1896 wooden cylinder, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
O Taiti (Nevermore), 1897, Courtauld Institute
Eve (The Nightmare), 1899–1900, monotype, J. Paul Getty Museum
Marquesas Islands[edit]
Door lintel at Maison du Jouir, 1901, Musée d'Orsay
Reconstruction of Gauguin's home Maison du Jouir (House of Pleasure) at Atuona.
Gauguin had nurtured his plan of settling in the Marquesas ever since seeing a collection of intricately carved Marquesan bowls and weapons in Papeete during his first months in Tahiti.However, he found a society that, as in Tahiti, had lost its cultural identity. Of all the Pacific island groups, the Marquesas were the most affected by the import of Western diseases (especially tuberculosis). An eighteenth century population of some 80,000 had declined to just 4,000.Catholic missionaries held sway and, in their effort to control drunkenness and promiscuity, obliged all native children to attend missionary schools into their teens. French colonial rule was enforced by a gendarmerie noted for its malevolence and stupidity, while traders, both western and Chinese, exploited the natives appallingly.
Gauguin settled in Atuona on the island of Hiva-Oa, arriving 16 September 1901.[g] This was the administrative capital of the island group, but considerably less developed than Papeete although there was an efficient and regular steamer service between the two. There was a military doctor but no hospital. The doctor was relocated to Papeete the following February and thereafter Gauguin had to rely on the island's two health care workers, the Vietnamese exile Nguyen Van Cam (Ky Dong), who had settled on the island but had no formal medical training, and the Protestant pastor Paul Vernier, who had studied medicine in addition to theology. Both of these were to become close friends.
He bought a plot of land in the center of the town from the Catholic mission, having first ingratiated himself with the local bishop by attending mass regularly. This bishop was Monseigneur art Martin, initially well disposed to Gauguin because he was aware that Gauguin had sided with the Catholic party in Tahiti in his journalism.
Père Paillard (Father Lechery), 1902, National Gallery of Art. Gauguin's lampoon of Bishop Martin.
Gauguin built a sturdy two-floor house on his plot, sturdy enough to survive a later cyclone which washed away most other dwellings in the town. He was helped in the task by the two best Marquesan carpenters on the island, one of them called Tioka, tattooed from head to toe in the traditional Marquesan way (a tradition suppressed by the missionaries). Tioka was a deacon in Vernier's congregation and became Gauguin's neighbour after the cyclone when Gauguin gifted him a corner of his plot. The ground floor was open-air and used for dining and living, while the top floor was used for sleeping and as his studio. The door to the top floor was decorated with a polychrome wood-carved lintel and jambs that still survive in museums. The lintel named the house as Maison du Jouir (i.e. House of Pleasure), while the jambs echoed his earlier 1889 wood-carving Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses (i.e. Be in Love, You Will Be Happy). The walls were decorated with, amongst other things, his prized collection of forty-five pornographic photographs he had purchased in Port Said on his way out from France. In the early days at least, until Gauguin found a vahine, the house drew appreciative crowds in the evenings from the natives, who came to stare at the pictures and party half the night away. Needless to say, all this did not endear Gauguin to the bishop, still less when Gauguin erected two sculptures he placed at the foot of his steps lampooning the bishop and a servant reputed to be his mistress,[156] and yet still less when Gauguin later attacked the unpopular missionary school system.The sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard, is to be found at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, while its pendant piece Thérèse realized a record $30,965,000 for a Gauguin sculpture at a Christie's London 2015 sale. These were among at least eight sculptures that adorned the house according to a posthumous inventory, most of which are lost today. Together they represented a very public attack on the hypocrisy of the church in sexual matters.
State funding for the missionary schools had ceased as a result of the 1901 Associations Bill promulgated throughout the French empire.The schools continued with difficulty as private institutions, but these difficulties were compounded when Gauguin established that attendance at any given school was only compulsory within a catchment area of some two and a half miles radius. This led to numerous teenage daughters being withdrawn from the schools (Gauguin called this process "rescuing"). He took as vahine one such girl, Vaeoho (also called Marie-Rose), the fourteen-year-old daughter of a native couple who lived in an adjoining valley six miles distant.This can scarcely have been a pleasant task for her as Gauguin's sores were by then extremely noxious and required daily dressing. Nevertheless, she lived willingly with him and the following year gave birth to a healthy daughter whose descendants continue to live on the island.
Le Sorcier d'Hiva Oa (Marquesan Man in a Red Cape), 1902, Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain de Liège
By November he had settled into his new home with Vaeoho, a cook (Kahui), two other servants (nephews of Tioka), his dog, Pegau (a play on his initials PG), and a cat. The house itself, although in the center of the town, was set amongst trees and secluded from view. The partying ceased and he began a period of productive work, sending twenty canvases to Vollard the following April.He had thought he would find new motifs in the Marquesas, writing to Monfreid:
I think in the Marquesas, where it is easy to find models (a thing that is growing more and more difficult in Tahiti), and with new country to explore – with new and more savage subject matter in brief – that I shall do beautiful things. Here my imagination has begun to cool, and then, too, the public has grown so used to Tahiti. The world is so stupid that if one shows it canvases containing new and terrible arts, Tahiti will become comprehensible and charming. My Brittany pictures are now rose-water because of Tahiti; Tahiti will become eau de Cologne because of the Marquesas.
— Paul Gauguin, Letter LII to George Daniel de Monfreid, June 1901
In fact his Marquesas work for the most part can only be distinguished from his Tahiti work by experts or by their dates,paintings such as Two Women remaining uncertain in their location.For Anna Szech, what distinguishes them is their repose and melancholy, albeit containing arts of disquiet. Thus, in the second of two versions of Cavaliers sur la Plage (Riders on the Beach), gathering clouds and foamy breakers suggest an impending storm while the two distant figures on grey horses echo similar figures in other paintings that are taken to symbolise death.
Gauguin chose to paint landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies at this time, with an eye to Vollard's clientele, avoiding the primitive and lost paradise themes of his Tahiti paintings.But there is a significant trio of pictures from this last period that suggest deeper concerns. The first two of these are Jeune fille à l'éventail (Young Girl with Fan) and Le Sorcier d'Hiva Oa (Marquesan Man in a Red Cape). The model for Jeune fille was the red-headed Tohotaua, the daughter of a chieftain on a neighbouring island. The portrait appears to have been taken from a photograph that Vernier later sent to Vollard. The model for Le sorcier may have been Haapuani, an accomplished dancer as well as a feared magician, who was a close friend of Gauguin's and, according to Danielsson, married to Tohotau.[Szech notes that the white color of Tohotau's dress is a symbol of power and death in Polynesian culture, the sitter doing duty for a Maohi culture as a whole threatened with extinction. Le Sorcier appears to have been executed at the same time and depicts a long-haired young man wearing an exotic red cape. The androgynous nature of the image has attracted critical attention, giving rise to speculation that Gauguin intended to depict a māhū (i.e. a third gender person) rather than a taua or priest.The third picture of the trio is the mysterious and beautiful Contes barbares (Primitive Tales) featuring Tohotau again at the right. The left figure is Jacob Meyer de Haan, a painter friend of Gauguin's from their Pont-Aven days who had died a few years previously, while the middle figure is again androgynous, identified by some as Haapuani. The Buddha-like pose and the lotus blossoms suggests to Elizabeth Childs that the picture is a meditation on the perpetual cycle of life and the possibility of rebirth.As these paintings reached Vollard after Gauguin's sudden death, nothing is known about Gauguin's intentions in their execution.
Self portrait, 1903, Kunstmuseum Basel
In March 1902, the governor of French Polynesia, Édouard Petit (fr), arrived in the Marquesas to make an inspection. He was accompanied by Édouard Charlier as head of the judicial system. Charlier was an amateur painter who had been befriended by Gauguin when he first arrived as magistrate at Papeete in 1895. However their relationship had turned to enmity when Charlier refused to prosecute Gauguin's then vahine Pau'ura for a number of trivial offences, allegedly housebreaking and theft, she had committed at Punaauia while Gauguin was away working in Papeete. Gauguin had gone so far as to publish an open letter attacking Charlier about the affair in Les Guêpes.Petit, presumably suitably forewarned, refused to see Gauguin to deliver the settlers' protests (Gauguin their spokesman) about the invidious taxation system, which saw most revenue from the Marquesas spent in Papeete. Gauguin responded in April by refusing to pay his taxes and encouraging the settlers, traders and planters, to do likewise.
At around the same time, Gauguin's health began to deteriorate again, revisited by the same familiar constellation of symptoms involving pain in the legs, heart palpitations, and general debility. The pain in his injured ankle grew insupportable and in July he was obliged to order a trap from Papeete so that he could get about town.By September the pain was so extreme that he resorted to morphine injections. However he was sufficiently concerned by the habit he was developing to turn his syringe set over to a neighbour, relying instead on laudanum. His sight was also beginning to fail him, as attested by the spectacles he wears in his last known self-portrait. This was actually a portrait commenced by his friend Ky Dong that he completed himself, thus accounting for its uncharacteristic style.It shows a man tired and aged, yet not entirely defeated. For a while he considered returning to Europe, to Spain, to get treatment. Monfreid advised him:
In returning you will risk damaging that process of incubation which is taking place in the public's appreciation of you. At present you are a unique and legendary artist, sending to us from the remote South Seas disconcerting and inimitable works which are the definitive creations of a great man who, in a way, has already gone from this world. Your enemies – and like all who upset the mediocrities you have many enemies – are silent; but they dare not attack you, do not even think of it. You are so far away. You should not return... You are already as unassailable as all the great dead; you already belong to the history of art.
— George Daniel Monfreid, Letter to Paul Gauguin circa October 1902
In July 1902, Vaeoho, by then seven months pregnant, left Gauguin to return home to her neighbouring valley of Hekeani to have her baby amongst family and friends. She gave birth the following September, but did not return. Gauguin did not subsequently take another vahine. It was at this time that his quarrel with Bishop Martin over missionary schools reached its height. The local gendarme Désiré Charpillet, at first friendly to Gauguin, wrote a report to the administrator of the island group, who resided on the neighbouring island of Nuku Hiva, criticising Gauguin for encouraging natives to withdraw their children from school as well as encouraging settlers to withhold payment of their taxes. As luck would have it, the post of administrator had recently been filled by François Picquenot, an old friend of Gauguin's from Tahiti and essentially sympathetic to him. Picquenot advised Charpillet not to take any action over the schools issue, since Gauguin had the law on his side, but authorised Charpillet to seize goods from Gauguin in lieu of payment of taxes if all else failed. Possibly prompted by loneliness, and at times unable to paint, Gauguin took to writing.
L'Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme (front and back covers, 1902, Saint Louis Art Museum
In 1901, the manuscript of Noa Noa that Gauguin had prepared along with woodcuts during his interlude in France was finally published with Morice's poems in book form in the La Plume edition (the manuscript itself is now lodged in the Louvre museum). Sections of it (including his account of Teha'amana) had previously been published without woodcuts in 1897 in La Revue Blanche, while he himself had published extracts in Les Guêpes while he was editor. The La Plume edition was planned to include his woodcuts, but he withheld permission to print them on smooth paper as the publishers wished.[184] In truth he had grown disinterested in the venture with Morice and never saw a copy, declining an offer of one hundred complimentary copies. Nevertheless, its publication inspired him to consider writing other books.At the beginning of the year (1902), he had revised an old 1896–97 manuscript L'Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme (The Modern Spirit and Catholicism) on the Roman Catholic church, adding some twenty pages containing arts gleaned from his dealings with Bishop Martin. He sent this text to Bishop Martin, who responded by sending him an illustrated history of the church. Gauguin returned the book with critical remarks he later published in his autobiographical reminisces.He next prepared a witty and well-documented e
