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Title: Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

Author: John Gould Fletcher

Release Date: February 12, 2012 [EBook #38848]

Language: English

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LIFE AND ART ***

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PAUL GAUGUIN
His Life and Art

BY

1
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS

NICHOLAS L. BROWN

NEW YORK

MCMXXI

2
Self-portrait of Gauguin.

TO

M.T.H.S.

WHO HELPED ME WITH

ADVICE AND CRITICISM

3
"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without
improvement are the roads of genius."
WILLIAM BLAKE.

CONTENTS
PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885
PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889
PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891
PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895
PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 1895-1903

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SELF-PORTRAIT OF GAUGUIN, Frontispiece

PORTRAIT OF GAUGUIN'S MOTHER
THE PAINTER SCHUFFENECKER AND HIS FAMILY
STRUGGLE OF JACOB WITH THE ANGEL
THE IDOL
TAHITIAN WOMEN
HINA MARURU (FEAST TO HINA)
THE OLD SPIRIT
CALVARY
MATAMUA (OLDEN DAYS)

4
 PAUL GAUGUIN

PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885

I
About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a
series of events which seemed at the time likely to be of
importance to future history, secondary only to the days of the
French Revolution. You will seek Paris in vain for any public
monument to these events, known as the Revolution of 1848. Only
the name of the hideously utilitarian Boulevard Raspail may
perhaps remind you, that in this year France achieved another one
of those political failures which have been so curiously common in
her history since 1789.
In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had
fled before the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that
the great popular revolution of the working classes, dreamed of by
every artist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures
of Daumier, latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was
at hand. A provisional republic was formed and elections were held
to the National Assembly. But the provinces showed that it
mattered little to them whether the form of Government was
changed or not. So long as the peasant had his farm, his cow, his
money safely stowed away in a stocking, a hard-working wife, a
pipe and a glass of wine, he was content with things as they were.
If the industrial classes of Paris were starving, that was not his
affair. He shared none of their fanatic Socialism, none of their
dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be left alone.
The National Assembly proved to be overwhelmingly moderate,
and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that
they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the
Parisian extremists. But the latter were not to be beaten without a

5
struggle. On the fifteenth of May, a mob attempted to take the
Assembly by storm, and failed. On the eighteenth, Lamartine, the
former idol of the Revolutionaries, was hooted down while making
a conciliatory speech. The Government found that it must either
provide work and wages for the Parisian unemployed or run the
risk of an appeal to force. A scheme was started, but it proved to
be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced
about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its
project. Three days later the storm broke. Two hundred and
twenty-one barricades arose as if by magic in the streets, crowned
with red flags and manned by sixty thousand men. For three days
the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade
fell, the blood was washed off the pavements, the cause of
"moderation" and "good sense" was restored.
There is a poetic justice in the coincidence of some events. On the
seventh of June a son, Paul, was born to M. and Madame
Gauguin, residing in Paris. This infant, brought obscurely into the
world to the sound of cannon, was destined by one of the ironic
dispensations of Nature to become later the leader of an art-
revolution as far reaching and as important in its effects as the
great attempt of 1848. His life was to be a constant struggle with
the growing bourgeois civilization, the middle-class morality, of the
late nineteenth century; his art was to speak the promise of a
renewed world, a world where man could again walk naked,
unashamed and free, as in Eden. He was destined to break
beneath the inert weight of social conventions and stupidities, as
the revolution had been broken by the armed forces at the disposal
of the government: but his ideas were to point the way to, new
conceptions of art and of life, which only the future can realize.
Clovis Paul Gauguin, to give the father his full name, was a petty
journalist from Orleans. He had a post as collaborator on one of
the obscure newspapers of Liberal opinion, that so greatly
flourished about this time. His influence upon his son was slight, as
is the case with the fathers of most artists. It is to Madame
Gauguin that we must turn for an explanation of the character of
her famous son.

6
 Portrait of Gauguin's mother.
Aline Marie Gauguin was the daughter of a certain Chazal, of
whom we know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist
pamphleteer and agitator, Flora Tristan.
Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru. Her father was a
Spaniard of noble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso. He served
as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the
wars of independence which severed Peru from Spain, since we
find him and his family later occupying positions of dignity and
affluence under the Republic. In 1818 he sent his daughter to
school in Paris. She eloped the next year with Chazal and was
disowned by her parents. After the birth of her child she separated

7
from her husband and returned to Peru, seeking a reconciliation
with her family. But the family had determined to do nothing for the
self-willed, impulsive daughter, and she drifted back to Paris,
where she attempted to support herself by writing pamphlets of
strongly Socialistic tendencies. She became a pioneer of woman's
suffrage, of humanitarianism, of the trade-union movement. She
toured France making speeches. In 1836 she had the misfortune
to meet Chazal again in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy
and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the
offense. A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-
unions, remembering her zeal for their cause and her personal
beauty—which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of
her speeches—subscribed the sum necessary to put up a
monument.
Such were the parents and the grand-parents of the child who had
just been born into the world. The tragic and violent union of
Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist
he later became. In Chazal we find the source of his violence and
headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his
love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of moral restraint,
his scorn of the bourgeoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicism.
Half-savage Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab,
Celt and African. Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even
other currents—currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had
subdued but not conquered. Whatever else destiny held in store
for him, it was certain from the beginning that Paul Gauguin could
never be wholly assimilated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous
and fickle city of Paris.

II
The earliest adventures of the future painter combined the peculiar
strands of tragedy, romance and savagery which were to recur so
often in his later life. In December, 1851, the makeshift Republic
came to an end and Louis Napoleon, by an easy coup d'état,
restored the Empire. Clovis Gauguin found himself ruined with the
suspension of the Liberal paper for which he wrote. There was only

8
one hope remaining: that Flora Tristan's relations in Lima might do
something for Paul and his sister Marie. So the family set out for
Peru. On the way, during the terrible passage through the Straits of
Magellan, Clovis Gauguin was seized with heart failure and died.
His body was taken ashore and buried at Port Famine, or Punta
Arenas, the southernmost town in the world, in Chile.
The mother and her two orphaned children were received with
kindness by the head of the family, Flora Tristan's uncle, Don Pio
Tristan y Moscoso. Concerning this personage Gauguin himself
told many anecdotes in later years. Probably most of these were
inexact to the point of being fable pure and simple. We must
remember that Gauguin at this time was scarcely four years of age.
We know that the family were wealthy nobles, of high social
standing, who lived in the old Castillian manner of luxury and
indolence. From such surroundings Gauguin doubtless derived
much of the "hidalgo manner" that distinguished him throughout life
—a blend of haughtiness, reserve and egoism, masking often a
real shyness before people. And here he saw, also for the first
time, works of art produced by a non-European civilization:
ceramics, jewelry, fabrics of Inca origin. The remembrance of these
specimens of savage, primitive art undoubtedly influenced his mind
in later years.
Gauguin's stay in Lima did not last long. Four years later his
paternal grandfather died in France, and his mother returned to
that country in order to obtain her share of his estate, which proved
to be only a small sum.
In later years, the painter believed, or affected to believe, that if his
mother had remained in Peru and had neglected her relations in
France she would have been left heiress to Don Pio Tristan's
property. It is probable that Gauguin was here merely romancing,
as he often did, when desiring to mystify and startle people about
his life. It is an enchanting but fruitless speculation to wonder what
course the boy's mind might have taken had it been subjected for a
few more years to the influence of Peruvian life. Peru undoubtedly
gave him a love for the tropics, for exotic, out-of-the-way, old-
fashioned places, unspoiled by the nineteenth century.
Unconsciously many of the traits that made his character so little

9
comprehensible to the Frenchmen of his day were planted in him
during these years.
France was now to give him something different. He was to be
educated, or rather to receive what passed for an education. He
remained at a seminary at Orleans till the age of seventeen, hating
his studies, becoming more and more intractable and unteachable.
This seminary, as all such institutions in France at the time, was
conducted by Jesuit priests.
In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years
that he had spent at the seminary were a hatred of hypocrisy, false
virtue and spying. And with malicious irony he said: "And I also
learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force
not to be despised in the struggle with other people."
His sole ambition was to escape, to get to sea again, to make
voyages to the tropics. His mother dreamed of placing him as a
cadet in the navy, but he ignominiously failed to pass the
necessary examination. He was therefore placed in the merchant
marine. This decision of his mother he regretted bitterly to the end
of his life.
In 1865 he embarked aboard the Luzitano, a cargo boat, on a
voyage from Havre to Rio de Janeiro. His grade aboard this ship
was that of a pilot's apprentice.
Of this voyage, which enabled him to see again the tropics,
Gauguin retained in later years important memories.
In the fragmentary notebooks he kept in Tahiti he declared that it
was during this voyage that he heard from the lips of a ship-mate a
story of the latter's life when ship-wrecked among the natives of
the Society Islands in the Pacific. The remembrance of that story
may have influenced him later in his choice of Tahiti as an ideal
residence. At least the appearance of Rio de Janeiro's harbor
awakened in his mind fresh enthusiasm for the tropics. The stay at
Rio was further signalized by a liaison with an actress, of that
eminently casual kind which Gauguin was to experience so often
later on. Finally the return voyage brought about another liaison,
this time with a Prussian woman, and in defiance of ship's
discipline. It was certain that his character—was not of the sort that

10
could be fitted easily into the mold of self-restraint necessary to
produce a capable naval officer. At all events, the next thing we
hear is that Gauguin quitted the merchant service and enlisted in
the French Navy as a common sailor, in February, 1868. Probably
by this time his mother had refused to support him, and he was
forced into this position through necessity.
The cruiser Jerome Napoleon, on which he found himself, was, to
his chagrin, ordered to cruise in northern waters. So instead of
seeing the tropics again, Gauguin's new experiences were only of
the ice-bound Greenland coast and the barren North Cape. This
was bad, but still worse was to follow. The vessel was on its way to
Spitzbergen when news was brought to its captain that France had
declared war upon Prussia.
"Where are you going?" said the second officer, seeing the Captain
put the helm about.
"To Charenton," replied the indignant first officer; Charenton being
the great lunatic asylum near Paris!
The vessel got no nearer to France than Copenhagen, when the
melancholy news of Sedan came. The name Jerome Napoleon
was painted out, that of Desaix substituted, and the unfortunate
cruiser was obliged to remain in the waters off Copenhagen till the
close of the war in 1871, contenting herself with the capture of one
small ship as prize.

III
In 1871, after the cessation of hostilities, Gauguin obtained leave,
renewable at the end of eighteen months, to quit the navy. He was
now heartily sick of the sea, because of the enforced idleness and
wearisome discipline that he had now endured aboard the Desaix
for three years. Besides the opportunity of another career was
offering itself and he felt that he must seize it.
His mother had died in the interval since he had last seen France
and, in dying, had confided the care of her two children to a well-
to-do Paris banker, Gustave Arosa. This man immediately found

11
for Paul a place at Bertin's, a banking house with which he was
connected. And now there opened for the young man a period not
only the most prosperous but in retrospect the most amazing of his
career.
Though his character had already displayed itself to be that of an
instinctive nomad, a lover of the tropics and essentially a pagan
savage, yet it is apparent that he now yielded readily to the
entrancing prospect of amassing a fortune by speculation on the
Bourse, without troubling himself too much with the question
whether his new position might not entail heavier responsibilities in
the future. He had not been long at Bertin's before he found out
how to make money quite easily. Possibly this was not a very
difficult thing to do, for the Paris stock market had been utterly
disorganized by the events of 1870-71, and, now that peace was
signed, France was making one of those rapid recoveries that
have been so common in her history. Stocks were going up and
trade was booming. Gauguin was able to take advantage of these
circumstances to such an extent that in one year, we are told, he
made as much as forty thousand francs.
In 1873 he married, thus saddling himself with a responsibility he
was never wholly to shake off. His wife, Mette Sophia Gad, was the
daughter of a Protestant clergyman of Copenhagen. The family
was a good one and enjoyed an honorable position in the society
of the Danish capital. The daughters had been educated at Paris,
and one of them had married a member of the Norwegian
Parliament, while another had become the first wife of the painter,
Fritz Thaulow.
When or where Gauguin first met his future bride is uncertain, but it
was probably during the stay of the Desaix at Copenhagen. At any
rate it seems that he was eager to marry, as the ceremony (a
purely civil one, owing to his wife being a Protestant) was delayed
owing to the loss of his father's certificate of birth in the
bombardment of St. Cloud.
At this time, through his wife's friends and connections, through
Gustave Arosa, through Emile Schuffenecker—a fellow employee
at Bertin's—and through others, a new interest came into his life.
He began to paint, although pressure of work did not permit him to
regard this fresh occupation as more than an amusement at first.

12
Arosa was, in his way, an amateur of art and had collected a
number of pictures by French artists of the day—among them
Delacroix and Courbet. These works he engraved in photogravure
—an art then in its infancy—and sent copies of the engravings to
his personal friends. Through Schuffenecker Gauguin was brought
closely into touch with the Impressionists, who were then making a
sensation in Paris. Gauguin bought brushes and colors and began
by painting on Sundays and holidays. It was only slowly that he
began to look upon painting as anything but a distraction.
His first essays in art were purely academic. He painted in the
prevailing style of the Salons and even sent one picture to the
Salon of 1876. At the same time he began to attempt sculpture. He
worked at first in marble, a material afterwards entirely rejected in
favor of the more coarsely-grained surface of wood, clay or paste.
He liked a rough surface and counseled young sculptors to mix
sand with the clay in order to emphasize this roughness.
Gauguin's was a many-sided and a versatile nature. His early
years at sea had given him much of the sailor's ingenuity. He had a
tremendous interest in the technical processes of art. During his
life he was able to do almost equally well at painting, lithography
and sculpture. He also attempted etching, stained glass and
pottery. His writings, particularly his share in "Noa Noa," show a
considerable grasp of direct, poetic narrative—a gift that might very
possibly have made of him a good poet. Throughout his life we are
unable to regard him solely as a painter of pictures; his influence in
opening new channels for art-decoration is even more important
than his pictorial work. Even in literature his achievements have a
certain force as inspiration. The problems he set himself were as
varied in their way as those that occupied his English
contemporary, William Morris, almost as varied as those that
occupied Leonardo da Vinci.
He acquired knowledge easily; his problem was always how to
weigh, sift and make use of it. But his growth to artistic maturity
was slower than in the case of artists who limit their field of effort,
because he attacked many subjects at the same time.
It may seem strange to consider this many-sided versatility as a
proof, not of a complex, but of a primitive nature. Yet it is
undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able

13
to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity
of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early
stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more
advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become
master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our
modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become
the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority.

The painter Schuffenecker and his family.

All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years
afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the
prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the
prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism.

To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional

art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the
supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the
ancestry of the movement.

14
Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism
—or to speak better, Naturalism—carried out in painting. This cult
had already possessed in painting one important precursor,
Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard
of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism
intended and why it failed.
A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in
France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a
change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the
world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and
Balzac, was now dead. The heroic, the Napoleonic, the Byronic
attitude had somehow gone out of life. Under the Second Empire,
the bourgeois triumphed over the Tuileries.
A few years before the crash of 1870, Charles Baudelaire gave to
the world his Fleurs du Mal—the exasperated cry against life of a
soul tortured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time
Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, erected his monument of
infamy to the memory of the bourgeois. These two books opened
the path to Naturalism, to the "human document," to the de
Goncourts, to de Maupassant, and to Zola.
Impressionism was the logical outgrowth, in another sphere, of the
work of these Naturalist writers.
It abolished the lighting of the studio and substituted for it natural
sunlight.
It abolished the classical "subject" and left the painter free to paint,
as Manet said, "N'importe quoi."
Thus, on the one side, it led directly to the analysis of atmospheric
vibration, foreshadowed by Constable and Turner, but not by them
elevated to the rank of a science; and on the other side, it led with
equal inevitability to the total dependence of the painter upon
Nature, and the consequent atrophy of his imagination. It was, as
Manet said again, "Nature seen through a temperament."
Against Impressionism, as against Romanticism, only one artist
had dared to continue the tradition of classical, decorative painting
descending from Giotto, through Raphael and Poussin, to Prud'hon
and to Ingres. This was the Norman, Puvis de Chavannes.

15
But Puvis, though nearly fifty, was still unknown, still dreaming of
walls to conquer, still buried away from the eyes of the young men
in the slumbrous depths of the official salons, while Impressionism
was the succès de scandale of the day.
Gauguin heard of Impressionism and became a devout follower of
its theories. He painted pictures in the manner of Camille Pissarro,
who was a compatriot of Madame Gauguin, having been born in
the Island of St. Thomas in the Antilles, then Danish territory.
Gauguin took part in the exhibitions of the Impressionist group in
1880 and 1881.
Huysmans, then as later the disciple of Naturalism pushed to its
extreme limit, praised a nude of his because it was ugly. Gauguin
began to be talked about, not only as a well-to-do amateur, but as
a coming artist. But his work at the Bourse was exhausting his
strength and his time.
Although he had now a wife and five children dependent on him,
Gauguin in January, 1883, took the rash step of quitting the
financial world and devoting himself solely to art.
This decision was, as Dr. Segalen says in his valuable Preface to
the letters Gauguin wrote from Tahiti, the true turning-point in his
career. When Paul Gauguin said to himself, "Henceforward I will
paint every day," he was not only satisfying his vague and latest
personal ambition and aptitude, he was setting himself to the
fulfillment of a great impersonal duty: he was beginning to clear
away the sophistications not only of his own nature but of modern
art.

IV
It is important to note that Gauguin was thirty-five years of age
when he came to this decision. This proves that the decision was
no hasty one, of which he was liable to repent later. At such an age
a man has arrived at his intellectual maturity; and, when this man
is a Paul Gauguin, we may feel sure that he does not alter his
whole manner of living from a mere desire for change. Gauguin

16
had something to express and knew it. He had better work to do
than dabbling in stocks and shares. And to this work he was
determined to devote himself despite all opposition.
But had he not been instinctively a nomad and a savage, with the
desire for freedom, for life without compromise and for the
harmony that comes only from a natural expression of one's
deepest instincts, this decision might never have been taken. As a
husband and father he now had others dependent upon him. That
he set aside their claims to follow the deeper call proves that, as
he later said, he believed himself to have the right to dare
everything. And he was probably at first confident of success,
thinking an artistic career likely to be as easy to manage as that of
a speculator.
Madame Gauguin seems to have acquiesced in this decision. She
was naturally desirous to be ranked as the wife of a famous and
successful man, and her husband may well have dazzled her with
the prospects of his success. In any case, she was soon destined
to sad disillusionment.
Gauguin found it impossible to support himself and six others on
the sums he had saved. As for his pictures, they were not
sufficiently well known to sell. It was necessary, above all things, to
gain time. So he decided to sacrifice a collection of modern
pictures which he had bought with the proceeds of his career on
the Bourse, in order to support himself. The list of these pictures is
interesting, as it shows clearly the direction of his tastes at this
period. It included a Manet, several Renoirs, some Claude Monets,
two Cézannes (still life and landscape), an early Pissarro, together
with examples of Guillamin, Sisley, Jongkind, Lewis Brown and,
most significant of all, two designs by Daumier.
Whether it was that Gauguin had continued to maintain his family
in a style above his present means and was therefore now in debt,
we do not know. Nor do we know whether the sale of his collection
realized an appreciable sum or not. Probably the amount was
small, for the Impressionists, though talked about, had not
achieved that purely commercial popularity which is the modern
substitute for fame. In any case, the painter soon found himself
again without resources. He had ignominiously failed to carve out a
new career for himself in Paris. He found that he could not now

17
obtain another commercial post to take the place of Bertin's. So it
was Madame Gauguin's turn to act. She decided on a removal to
Copenhagen, where she hoped her family would use their
influence in obtaining a position for her husband.
Once in the Danish city, however, the basic difference between
husband and wife showed itself in violent form. The atmosphere of
rigid Protestant piety, in which his wife's family lived, jarred on the
passionate southern temperament of the painter. He discovered
that he hated everything in Denmark, the scenery, the climate, the
prudery and provinciality of the inhabitants, the lack of Parisian
Bohemianism—everything except the cookery of his mother-in-law!
And he took no pains to conceal his hatred. He defiantly persisted
in maintaining his Parisian freedom of speech and manners. One
day, walking on the road that overlooks the bay of the Sund, he
chanced to look down. Each of the estates adjoining the beach is
equipped with a small cabin for bathing. It is the custom there for
the sexes to bathe separately and entirely naked. Gauguin
chanced to stop and look down at the moment when the wife of a
Protestant minister was stepping into the water. Instead of going
on, he decided to indulge his æsthetic interest in the nude. The
daughter of the minister's wife saw him and called out to her
mother to return. The lady turned and started hastily back to her
cabin. But Gauguin continued his inspection. Next day there was
the inevitable scandal.
Such a state of affairs could clearly not continue. Gauguin would
yield nothing to the prejudices of the Danes, nor would his wife's
family change their ideas of respectability to suit his queer notions.
A separation between husband and wife was inevitable. In 1885 it
came about with, one may imagine, no great regrets on either side.
To the painter this marriage had all along been a matter of
convenience. We shall have ample opportunity to observe
throughout his career that Gauguin attached practically no
sentiment to the sexual relations into which he entered with various
women. He was probably more affectionate with his children,
particularly with his daughter Aline, than ever with his wife.
It was now far more convenient for him that his wife should remain
with her relations, where she would at least have a roof over her
head, than accompany him to Paris, whither he was determined to

18
return. Madame Gauguin agreed with this arrangement, hoping to
see her husband, now disembarrassed of his family, make a rapid
conquest of the Parisian art-world. And so in 1885 Paul Gauguin
returned to France once more to try his fortune.

V
He was now thirty-seven years old. Hitherto the events of his life
had been largely controlled by chance; from now on he began to
strive more consciously to be the master of his own destiny. It is
therefore necessary, before going further with this story, to take
stock of the man, both as regards his physical appearance and his
intellectual equipment.
Gauguin was of not more than middle height, but stockily built and
of strong physical development. His hair, which later grew thinner
and lost much of its coloring, was chestnut inclining towards red,
and fell in large straggling masses over a broad but rather low
forehead. The eye-brows were arched and gave a skeptical
appearance to the eyes, which were heavy-lidded, small and gray-
green in color—the eyes of one who has spent many years at sea.
The nose was large, thick and aquiline. A thin drooping mustache,
lighter in color than the hair, hung over the mouth, with its large,
coarse lips drooping at the corners. The chin was pointed and
retreating and, in later life, furnished with a short tufted beard
similar in color to the mustache.
After Gauguin's return from the Antilles in 1887 it is the testimony
of all who knew him that his skin had become as bronzed as an
Indian's, and that he dressed and looked altogether like a sailor.
Even his excessive devotion to tobacco, a habit that later was
seriously to injure his health, had something sailor-like in it.
Gauguin rolled his own cigarettes in the Spanish fashion and
smoked commonly a short clay pipe. His hands, too, were not
those of an artist but of a seaman—coarse, square and red.
Altogether he was in appearance curiously Creole; he did not
resemble a Frenchman of France. The dark tint of his skin and the
formation of the face and features belied the color of the eyes and
hair.

19
His personal characteristics were unfavorably judged by most of
those with whom he came in contact. It must be remembered,
however, that he was by nature reserved and even suspicious, as
are many people of fundamental genius. He differed from those
about him in that he worked by instinct, while they worked
according to some conscious method. He therefore obtained out of
himself, by means of slow thinking and laborious effort, the
knowledge which many have at the beginning. Further, the study
and practice of art is in itself so exhausting of physical and
emotional fibre as to leave its possessor with little reserve of tact
and dissimulation with which to face the world. Finally, Gauguin
was shy, actually and by nature shy. People took this shyness for
rudeness and this reserve for disdain. And Gauguin was not
always unwilling to profit by this misunderstanding. He carefully
cultivated his rudeness, both to create an effect and to keep bores
at a distance.
As regards his work, he was on the way to find his path, although
he never entirely found it, even to the end of his career. His
versatility prevented his art from ever becoming fixed and dead,
like that of many popular and highly successful painters.
Mention has already been made of his appearance in 1880 among
the Impressionists and of the praise bestowed by Huysmans on
one of his pictures for its frank realism. This very nude, however,
shows Gauguin massing his shadows, making them heavy and
dark, which was the direct contrary to Impressionist practice. A
year later we find Huysmans complaining of the low and muddy
color of his pictures; another proof that the painter was already
trying to mass tones, to escape from the division of tones
employed by the Impressionist group.
We are safe in assuming also that Gauguin felt already an inward
desire to paint nature as he had seen her in the tropics. His early
years had shown him the tropics; and the art of the greatest
masters, as well as of the worst daubers, is based on the
instinctive knowledge they have obtained during childhood and the
use they have made of it in later years. Pissarro, too, had seen the
tropics; but they had not in any way influenced his color sense,
which, indeed, grew colder and grayer as his years advanced. But
he may have had something to do with Gauguin's inclination

20
towards tropical subjects, though the feeling of kinship with Nature
which Gauguin brought to such subjects was all his own.
If Gauguin had but known it, there waited for him not the future of
fame and fortune of which he dreamed, but seventeen years of life-
and-death struggle with actual hunger in a world that gave him
neither the means of living nor the slightest encouragement, but
only hampered him in every way, so that he was forced to paint his
finest decorative pictures on small pieces of board or canvas
instead of on great walls. He was to quit his own country, and to go
to the ends of the earth, only to find that the system of civilization
possessed by his country, whatever its other advantages, did not
permit of an artist to live and enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was
finally to sink into an unmarked grave, to be almost forgotten, and
to attain to a commercial apotheosis only when no longer able to
profit by it. Even if Gauguin could have realized this, it is doubtful if
he would have changed his mind. Ready to dare everything, he
strode forward into the future.

PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH

IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889
I
With the return of Gauguin to Paris there opened for him the
second stage of his career, the struggle to maintain himself on the
productions of his brush and chisel. During the first stage his
character had been formed by the hard experiences of seafaring
and by the comparative leisure and affluence of his epoch of
splendor, during which he found time to discuss the principles of
art with the best exponents of the latest French tradition. He had
not only met and talked with men like Manet, Pissarro, and
Cézanne, he also visited the museums of Paris, and did not
confine himself to the Louvre, but made a special study of the
Musée Guimet with its collection of art works from the far East, and
later of the Trocadero, with its casts of Cambodian sculpture. His
stay at Bertin's had been of good service in giving him the mental

21
equipment, the self-education necessary to begin the struggle for
artistic independence.
Yet in his case we know far less of what passed in his mind during
these important years of development than in the case of most of
his contemporaries. "He was the sort of man to be awake to
everything new in art that was going on," says one who knew him
in this period, "but not to acknowledge indebtedness to anything or
anybody." What he absorbed was by instinct; and instinct
cautioned him not to share his knowledge with people who might
fail to make good use of it.
Amid the noisy chatter of Parisian art-circles he passed silent and
unnoted. He rented a studio and began to busy himself with all
sorts of experimental projects, particularly with sculpture. But very
shortly his resolution and character were further tested by the new
experience of hunger.
For a time he suffered extreme privation. He was forced at last to
accept a salary of three francs fifty centimes a day for pasting
advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord in order to save
himself from starvation.
"I have known," he wrote in a small notebook dedicated to his
daughter Aline, "extreme misery, that is to say hunger and
everything that follows upon hunger. It is nothing, or almost
nothing. One grows accustomed to it and, with will-power, one can
end by laughing at it. But what is terrible is to be prevented from
working, from developing one's intellectual faculties. It is true that
suffering sharpens one's ability. But it is necessary not to suffer too
much or suffering will kill you.
"With a great deal of pride I have ended by having a great deal of
energy, and I have forced myself to be full of will-power.
"Is pride a fault, or must one develop one's pride? I believe pride
must be developed. It is the best weapon we have against the
human animal that is in us."
This quotation gives us the man entirely. He was one of those who
are not to be beaten, one of those who do not turn back. He was to
go forward and to maintain himself while seeking a path.

22
In 1886 he contributed no less than nineteen pictures to an
exhibition of the Impressionist group, together with a relief in wood,
which seems to foreshadow the later creator of La Guerre et la
Paix.
Most of these early works of Gauguin seem to have disappeared.
Very few can recall seeing one. It is therefore interesting to read
the following appreciation by Felix Fenéon, which shows that
Gauguin was already traveling far from the formulas that satisfied
the other impressionists:—
"The tones of M. Paul Gauguin's pictures are very little separated
from each other; because of this, there is in his work a dull
harmony. Dense trees rise from the fertile soil, abundant and
humid, invade the frame, pursue the sky. The air is heavy. Bricks
seen between the trunks indicate a nearby house; things are lying
about, muzzles are scattered in the thicket—cows. These reds of
roofs and of cattle the artist constantly opposes to his greens and
reflects them again in the waters, encumbered with long grasses,
which run between the tree-trunks."
This shows clearly that Gauguin was treating landscape at this
period already as a synthesis, a decorative whole and not, like
Manet, Pissarro or the Divisionists, as an exercise in the analysis
of atmospheric vibration. As for the relief on wood, Fenéon writes:
"On the pear-tree wood, which we regret to see left in
monochrome, a naked woman stands out in half relief, her hand to
her hair, seated rectangularly in a landscape. This is the only
number of sculpture. Nothing in painted wood, in glass-paste, in
wax."
Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He
must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the
theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors,
the Pointillists—theories of the disassociation of tones and of the
analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of
Chevreuil and Helmholtz—he was painfully tending back to the old
decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious
expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best
friend of the independent artist. He fled from Paris and sought
refuge in the country.

23
 II
The place of refuge which Gauguin found was the village of Pont-
Aven in the district of Finistère in Brittany.
There is no doubt that this chosen spot and its surroundings had
upon his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by
Tahiti. Indeed the charm of Tahiti itself was slow to efface this
influence.
The Celtic fringe of Europe—Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia—presents everywhere a great
similarity in natural feature and in the character of its inhabitants.
The Celt is an outcast. Driven backward by successive waves of
civilization and conquest, he has finally occupied those lands
which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to
remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate
places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps
he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth
century—with its railroads and the life-weariness of its cultivated
classes—made of him a curiosity. The hordes of tourists, of bad
artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall,
or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization
has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a
savage.
Paul Gauguin did not assuredly go to Brittany to discover the
picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no
higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His
real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere—
under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation.
But the gloom, the melancholy inertia, the mystic faith, the
simplicity of this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and
menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him.
Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless
and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in
appearance, as in manners, a sailor—the eye, the direct curt
speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in
him had been accentuated by his early experiences. In Brittany he
found the sea; he found an unspoiled people; he found, above all,

24
repose from the everlasting chatter of art-theories that, like the
bubbling of endless bottles of too light champagne, frothed
eternally in the cafés of Paris. Brittany gave him greater faith in
himself; Brittany began to dispel the nineteenth century skepticism
that was slowly stifling him.

25
 Struggle of Jacob with the Angel.
His first stay in Pont-Aven was destined to be short. It is chiefly
remarkable for the fact that here he was visited by Emile Bernard,
then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with
Gauguin and other painters afford matter for so much controversy
that they must be examined in detail.
Bernard was the type of infant phenomenon that springs up,
mushroom-like, in an overheated atmosphere of artistic and literary
controversy. At the age of sixteen he was writing violently
naturalistic and extremely bad poetry. He next went in for painting,
raced off to Brittany to see Gauguin, was received with coolness,
ran back to Paris. Here he found Van Gogh fresh from Holland
and, when Van Gogh in turn went to Arles, became his most
industrious correspondent. Later he heard that the crazy old
hermit, Paul Cézanne, was living at Aix—so off to Aix went
Bernard. More letters were the outcome of the visit.
Meanwhile he progressed in painting from a divisionist and neo-
impressionist technique to a facile imitation of Gauguin's Breton
style, then to a combination of Cézanne and Gauguin, to conclude

26
with painting of Oriental subjects in a style not so very far removed
from that of Gerome. He imitated everyone in turn, only to end by
becoming that drab eclectic thing—what the French call a
"pompier" or we an "Academician." Thus he justified Gauguin's
sardonic prophecy that "Bernard would end up something like
Benjamin Constant!"
We owe Bernard a debt in that he has preserved for us the
beautiful letters which Van Gogh wrote to him, and—more precious
debt—that he has given us those rare talks and letters in which
that old stoic Cézanne revealed a glimpse of his agony. But we
owe Bernard nothing in that he has seen fit to defame the art and
character of the man whose style he was the first to copy—Paul
Gauguin. But of this more later.

27
 III
The winter of 1886 found Gauguin again in Paris. Here he met
another artist whose life was destined to have upon his an
influence quite different from that of Emile Bernard.
This was Vincent Van Gogh, newly arrived from Holland. Gauguin
has left on record in a piece of prose called Les Crevettes Roses
his first impression of Van Gogh, which proves beyond dispute that
Gauguin loved Van Gogh and admired him, despite his habitual
reserve and the haughty disdain with which he was already looking
upon all things European.
At this time Gauguin was still painfully seeking, still patiently and
laboriously struggling towards his own self-realization. Van Gogh,
although five years younger, had fully realized himself in essence
—was, in fact, realized from the beginning. The difference between
them was that Van Gogh was an humble Dutch peasant, with the
mystic blend of religion and animality which is common to Flemish
and Dutch artists (for example, Breughel, Rubens or Verhaeren),
while Gauguin was a Spaniard, hard and aristocratic, but corrupted
by cosmopolitan influences and the strain of French blood.
For Van Gogh the future only held the liberating spiritual worship of
the sun, which was to raise his art to its highest pitch of lyric
ecstacy and to destroy the brain that had created it. For Gauguin
the future held a long and stoic struggle with the ironic destiny that
left him half-an-European to the end, his work only a broken
fragment of what he had dreamed.
It is a pity, in a way, that these men ever met. But their meeting and
the drama which was played out later between them, had in it the
inevitable quality of Greek tragedy. For the moment their meeting
was without result, except that perhaps it woke Gauguin to a
realization that to be a great artist one must love life as well as love
art. In short, one must be religious. But where was Gauguin to find
his religion?

28
Certainly not in Paris, the capital of intellectual skepticism. Nor, for
the moment, in sleepy and mournful Brittany. The memories of his
early initiation into the splendors of the tropics awoke in him and
he undertook, in 1887, a voyage to the Martinique in company with
a young painter, Charles Laval.
There is no doubt that this journey completely revealed to Gauguin
his own primitivism, although it left him for the time an invalid,
threatened with dysentery, suffering from constant intestinal pains,
and although it brought Laval to the brink of the grave.
If the reader wishes to know something of what Martinique was at
this time, he should turn to Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the
French West Indies." Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized
cosmopolite, disgusted with the banal artifice, the blatant
commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our
Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West
Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature
—a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes,
something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the
flowers, the beasts among which they lived. Like Gauguin again,
Hearn was nearly destroyed by this vision, but yet kept faith with it
to the last.

29
 The Idol.
In the pictures which Gauguin produced during his stay in
Martinique, we find the first rude indications of his later manner—
the manner of a mystic poet who sees all life, the life of man, of
vegetation, of the earth and the sea, as being parallel, harmonious
manifestations of the same Divine presence and therefore
essentially in unity with each other.

30
If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found
himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the
sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of
mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy,
banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint
for the future.
His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing
with him pictures—experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the
glow and gloom of the tropics with Pissarro's analysis of paler
northern sunlight. He brought back also the germ of thousands of
other pictures which he, as yet, could not paint. He brought back
with him an idea.

31
 IV
After seeing the Antilles and returning to Paris, Gauguin was again
brought face to face with the problem against which he had already
struggled—the problem of his poverty.
He had obtained at Martinique the vision of a new world of art,
which he knew he was some day destined to realize. But for the
present he had neither lodging and studio, nor resources of any
kind. He was forced to live on charity.
Charity came to him in the shape of Emile Schuffenecker, who had
also given up finance for a career as artist.
Schuffenecker was not a genius, but he knew ability when he saw
it, and opened his doors freely to this needy colleague. It is a pity
that Gauguin repaid this generous hospitality of a friend by
insulting Schuffenecker as an artist.
Gauguin's relations with his friends are amongst the most painful
episodes of his life. One is almost inclined to think with Emile
Bernard that "the basis of Gauguin's character was a deep-seated
egoism," or, with Meier-Graefe, that Gauguin was nothing but a
great child. Neither of these views is, however, wholly correct.
Gauguin was the son, be it remembered, of a radical journalist and
the grandson of a Socialist pamphleteer. Journalism in France is
not the same thing as in England. There is scarcely any polite
journalism in France. Gauguin himself was always talking,
according to Bernard, of art and life needing "the blow of the fist."
Paul Déroulède, Edmond Drumont, Henri Rochefort, Octave
Mirbeau, Zola, Clemenceau, and other celebrated journalists of the
Dreyfus period (the heyday of French journalism) knew quite well
what this "blow of the fist" meant, and practiced it upon every
opportunity.
Moreover, Gauguin was nearly forty, had knocked about the world
a great deal, banging himself against many sharp corners in the
process, and was face to face with want. It is also possible that he

32
felt bound, for the sake of his wife and children, to make as much
money as possible. Finally, he believed in himself as an artist, if no
one else did. The world had well hammered into him the hard
lesson that one must either hold a high opinion of oneself or
become an object of contempt. As he put it himself, "Is it necessary
to be modest, or, in other words, an imbecile?"
So he accepted the use of Schuffenecker's studio, sold as many of
his own pictures as he could, and sneered loudly at
Schuffenecker's attempt to paint. Later on we find him accepting
similarly Van Gogh's hospitality, irritating Van Gogh to the pitch of
madness, and—after Van Gogh's death—sending to Bernard and
seeking to oppose the proposed exhibition of Van Gogh's pictures
on the ground that Van Gogh was only a madman. And later still,
when Van Gogh's reputation began to rise in public esteem,
Gauguin declared that Van Gogh had learned from him and had
called him master.
Such traits are deplorable, if we consider Gauguin as an ordinary
man. But if we treat genius as ordinary humanity and insist upon it
conforming in every particular to ordinary standards, it is quite
certain that we will never have any genius worthy of the name.
Gauguin sinned in good company, with Michaelangelo who thought
Raphael had plotted against him, and with Berlioz who has left on
record his opinion of Wagner's music. To understand Gauguin one
must share to some extent the opinion of Flaubert—which,
incidentally, Browning almost endorses—that the man is nothing,
the work is all.
It is not easy to read between the lines of Gauguin's self-imposed
reserve and self-determined resolve to shock the bourgeoisie. If
we attempt to do so, we find a man so set upon his own path that
he was almost without friends. Van Gogh he loved without
understanding. Daniel de Monfreid he perhaps loved and
understood. The shadowy figure of Tehura, a figure perhaps
idealized, was to be the only woman who greatly moved him.
Puvis de Chavannes, an artist to whom Gauguin owed much,
similarly held himself aloof from all. So did Degas and Ingres, two
other artists of Gauguin's stamp. So in ancient Greece did
Sophocles.

33
The truly strong spirits of this world are not those who exist solely
on the surface of things. One can only sympathize with them,
share their imaginings through long and patient study. Gauguin
was not altogether strong; on some sides he was weak, as he
himself admitted. But his work increased in vitality and in strength
as his aim became more clear. Schuffenecker's studio was useful
to him; he stayed in Paris just long enough to sell as many pictures
as he could and to copy Manet's Olympia, a picture he greatly
admired. Then once more he took the road to Brittany.

34
 V
Despite the fact that Gauguin had, before leaving Paris, held his
first one-man show and had actually sold a few pictures, his
general situation was not improved. He was now heavily in debt,
and his health, undermined at Martinique, remained bad.
He was at an age at which most men find themselves obliged to
take stock of the past and to calculate their chances for the future.
In Gauguin's case the chances were very small. He was crushed
by his own impotence to realize the art he had dreamed.
It was at this juncture that Vincent Van Gogh, now at Aries, came
forward and offered him a lodging, despite the fact that he himself
could not sell his own pictures and was entirely dependent on the
self-sacrificing efforts of his brother Theodore.
For a time Gauguin did not respond to Van Gogh's generous offer
to share their fortunes in common. But he sent his own portrait to
Vincent, a gloomy, powerful piece of painting which, in the opinion
of some, so startlingly resembles Robert Louis Stevenson—like
Gauguin a wanderer, but with what a difference! To Vincent this
portrait suggested a prisoner, with its yellow flesh and deep blue
shadows. He was more than ever determined to draw Gauguin out
of the slough of despond into which he was falling, and to work
together with him for the better establishment of both their
reputations.
One can only admire Van Gogh for this decision. An artist of a
childlike simplicity of soul, a combination of Don Quixote, the Good
Samaritan and that Jesus of Nazareth whom he loved, Van Gogh
was even greater as a man than as an artist. But Gauguin was, as
he knew himself later, greater as an artist than as a man. It was
natural for him to accept the invitation of a man whom he knew,
after all, very slightly, because he saw in this acceptance possible
advantages to himself.
Van Gogh's enthusiasm was unfortunately not backed, as was
Gauguin's, by a strong reserve of nervous strength. His was one of

35
those souls whose longing for spiritual reality followed inevitably
the mystic path traced by William Blake:—
I will go down to self-annihilation and to eternal death
Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,
And I be seiz'd and given into the hands of my own selfhood.
Gauguin's path tended to a different goal and followed the way
foreseen by Whitman:—
O, to struggle against odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can
stand
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium face to face,
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns
with perfect
nonchalance,
To be indeed a God!
Van Gogh was a lyric painter. His desire was to lose himself in the
ecstacy of the divine. Gauguin was a narrative, an epic painter. His
aim was to grow to divine stature through self-realization.
What could there be in common between the fervent admirer of
Rembrandt, Delacroix, Monticelli, Ziem, and the brooding, patient
workman who was building up his art on the classic tradition of
Ingres, Cézanne and Degas? Surely even less than between
Michaelangelo and Tintoretto.
A drama between these men was inevitable. It was not slow in
declaring itself.[1] Of what actually occurred we have only
Gauguin's account, of how Van Gogh first attacked him, and then
strove to take his own life.
Van Gogh, upon whose shattered nervous organism the shock had
spent itself, went voluntarily into a lunatic asylum at Arles, where,
as his grip on life grew weaker under the pressure of the inner
flame that devoured him, he painted visions of worlds tortured by
the sun. Gauguin returned to Brittany, as he said, "armed against
all suffering." But he had seen something. In striving to paint Van
Gogh's portrait he had seen a vision, once again to quote his own
words, of "Jesus preaching goodness and humility." And perhaps,
in Vincent's hour of agony, while he lay bloodless and inanimate on

36
the bed in that little room which he had loved and had painted so
lovingly, Gauguin had another vision—of the sombre Garden of
Gethsemane.
Thus maybe there was awakened still more clearly in his spirit that
desire for harmony between the flesh and the soul, between nature
and God, between the earth and the stars that hang over the earth,
which he was to seek desperately to the last and strive to realize,
despite the baseness of that other part in him, the civilized,
unprimitive part, which strove merely to destroy the harmony and
to smile at its work of baseness.
[1] Gauguin and Van Gogh were actually together from the 20th
October to the 23d December, 1888.

PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-

1891

37
 I
In 1889 there opened in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars the
Universal Exposition, to celebrate the centennial of the taking of
the Bastile. Of this exhibition and of the palace built to house it,
nothing now remains except the melancholy Eiffel Tower.
The pictures admitted to the exhibition were, rather naturally, of a
kind sanctioned by academic officialdom. Wherefore visitors who
happened to patronize the Café Volpini near the entrance were
doubtless startled to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a
kind calculated to shock all their susceptibilities in art matters.
Their perplexity cannot have been greatly lessened by the receipt
of a catalogue bearing this title: "Catalogue of the Exposition of
Pictures of the Impressionist and Syntheticist Group, held on the
Premises of M. Volpini, at the Champ-de-Mars, 1889."
The exhibitors were people of whom the respectable patrons of the
Café Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:
—E. Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin,
Louis Roy, Léon Fauché, Georges Daniel, Ludovic Nemo (a
pseudonym of Bernard's) and lastly, Paul Gauguin. Lithographs,
printed in black upon yellow paper and not less extraordinary than
the pictures, were also visible upon request. These were by
Bernard and Gauguin.
The result of this exhibition was that the public laughed, the papers
protested, the young students of art in the various ateliers of Paris
were stimulated to furious discussion. But a few spirits, more
venturesome or more prophetic, took the trouble to test the new
ideas. A few, chief among them Sérusier of the Académie Julian,
even set out to visit the birthplace of the new movement, a lonely
inn kept by a family of the name of Gloanec at Le Poldu, a short
distance from Pont-Aven.
A brief survey of the history of Syntheticism is necessary to an
understanding of the theories of the new school. Here we enter
upon debatable ground. It has already been said that the chief

38
opponents of the academicism of Cabanel and Bougereau were
the Impressionists. Their movement was already through its
second phase and entering upon its third. The earliest of the
Impressionists, led by Manet, insisted that a picture was only
nature seen through a temperament; in other words, that a picture
must be naturalistic. This doctrine found parallel literary expression
in the writings of the de Goncourts, de Maupassant and Zola. The
first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and
maintained a belief in form.
It was succeeded by an analytical phase, based upon the
application to color of the scientific theories of light, of Rood,
Chevreuil and Helmholtz. To Claude Monet, the founder of this new
school of Impressionism, nothing mattered in a picture but the
atmosphere. Form was abandoned.
After Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Guillamin, a new group, of
whom the chief were Seurat and Signac, attempted to combine the
tenets of their two sets of predecessors. They retained formal
composition but broke up color into minute points or dots. This
third generation of Impressionists were originally termed Neo-
Impressionists but now, more frequently, Pointillists.
Three artists stood out against the tendency towards scientific
theory. Puvis de Chavannes had, within the very precincts of the
official salon, created an art based on something wholly distinct,
alike from the photographic and frigid eclecticism of Cabanel and
Bougereau and from the work of both Manet and Monet. Puvis was
a decorator who could think and paint only in terms of walls. He
had achieved, after a long struggle, a decorative synthesis of his
own, based upon the ruthless simplification of masses, contours
and coloring. Reserved, cold, solitary, he had emptied his art of all
rhetorical emphasis and in his old age was tending closer and
closer to the methods of Giotto, that father of all European
painting.
Paul Cézanne, the hermit of Aix, had faced the problem of painting
with the Impressionist palette while preserving the mass structure
of his true spiritual ancestors—the Venetians and El Greco. As a
result he was thought to be mad and even considered by some to
be a myth, for he lived far from Paris and had for long enough sent
no pictures to be exhibited. Finally, Degas, associating himself with

39
the Impressionists at the outset, had been careful to preserve the
classic line and composition of Ingres, who might be called the last
of Florentines. Degas was considered an artist of small importance
because, unlike Manet, he scorned to give himself airs. He lived a
retired life in Paris, and did not exhibit.
These three men—Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas—
had, through their own inner necessity, become syntheticists. But
no one of them preached Syntheticism, because their adherence
to the creed was unconscious. The doctrine was first voiced by the
men who exhibited with Paul Gauguin at the Café Volpini in 1889,
who lived and worked with him at the Gloanec inn, near Pont-Aven.
It was from these men that the reaction against Impressionism
started, a reaction which, in its turn, was destined to provoke
another reaction towards the theories of mathematical and
analytical abstraction of line, color and form, which we know as
Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. It was these men surrounding
Gauguin, who forged the last living link in the chain of art tradition
which goes back through Giotto and Cimabue to the Byzantine
mosaics, and, through these, to the first essays in art of cave-men
and savages. With Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism we may be
witnessing the beginning of a new tradition. With Gauguin and his
fellows we see the renaissance of an old one.

40
 II
As early as 1886, in an article in the Revue Indépendante, the well-
known critic Eduard Dujardin had spoken of a group calling
themselves the Cloissonists, who painted in flat patches of tone,
divided from each other by black lines.
Cloissonism, as the name indicates, was borrowed from the
Japanese. But as a method of painting, it had been derived less
from cloisonné enamel than from the technique of the Japanese
color-print artists.
The artistic gods of the Cloissonists were Hokusai, Hiroshige,
Utamaro. It may be remembered that since 1865 men like Zola,
Manet, Monet, Whistler, the de Goncourts—in short the entire
generation of the naturalists—had collected these color prints,
written about them, talked about them.
Gauguin himself, when he returned to Paris at the close of this
year 1889, pinned a frieze of Hokusai and Utamaro prints round
the walls of his studio.
But the existence of this somewhat baroque and exotic school of
Cloissonism, of which the leader was Anquetin (later ranked with
the Syntheticists), does not fully explain the use of Syntheticism
with its greater insistence upon decorative unity, and its clearer
affinities to the work of the Italian primitives.
As to the origin of Syntheticism we have divergent statements from
contemporary witnesses.
The English artist, A.S. Hartrick, who was studying in Paris from
1886 to 1889 and who knew personally both Gauguin and Van
Gogh, ascribes the Synthetic theory to Gauguin in these terms:—
"From a study of thirteenth century glass he (Gauguin) got an idea
of design and color which exactly suited his state of development,
and he then proceeded to translate it into an art of his own, using
oil paint as a vehicle."[1]

41
Of similar opinion is the well known French artist and writer,
Maurice Denis, whose work has done so much to popularise
Gauguin. He declares in his book "Theories,"[2] that Gauguin was
the "incontestable originator" and master of the new movement, to
which he gives two names: Neo-Traditionism and Symbolism. In
the first account which he wrote of the movement in 1890, an
account obtained from the lips of Paul Sérusier, one of the earliest
of Gauguin's disciples after 1889, Denis includes the following
interesting paragraph:
"Did not Paul Gauguin originate this ingenious and unpublished
history of modeling?
"At the beginning there was the pure arabesque, as little deceptive
of the eye as possible; a wall is empty; cover it with symmetrical
spots of form, harmonious in color:—stained glass, Egyptian
pictures, Byzantine mosaics.
"From this comes the painted bas-relief:—metopes of the Greek
temple, the church of the Middle Ages.
"Then the attempt to attain to the ornamental deception of the eye
practised in Antiquity is resumed in the fifteenth century by the
Italian primitives, who replace the painted bas-relief by paintings
modeled to imitate bas-relief, but in other respects preserve the
first idea of decorative unity. Recall also under what conditions
Michaelangelo, a sculptor, decorated the Sistine ceiling.
"Perfection of this modeling; modeling in high-relief. This leads
from the first academy of the Caracchi to our decadence."
Emile Bernard holds a contrary opinion. His view was originally
published in the Mercure de France and reasserted in his preface
to the letters written to him by Van Gogh.[3] Bernard, who revolted
from the Atelier Cormon with Anquetin, had, as we have seen,
been repulsed by Gauguin in in 1886. After a brief return to Paris
he went off to Saint-Briac, where he covered the walls of the inn
with frescoes and painted the windows, in imitation of stained-
glass, employing essence of turpentine as a medium. In 1888,
before Gauguin came to Arles, Bernard was brought into contact
with him again through the mediation of Theodore Van Gogh and,

42
although young enough to be Gauguin's son (being about twenty at
this time), shared with him the honors of the Volpini exhibition.
Bernard claims that he, and he alone, invented Syntheticism, and
bases his claim on the evidence of the pictures (all dated) which
Gauguin painted previous to 1888, and in which Gauguin was still
definitely Impressionist in technique. He maintains that Gauguin
abruptly changed his style after the second meeting in 1888, when
he first saw what his younger rival had been doing. Furthermore,
Bernard contends that this style was solely based upon the
application of Cézanne's discoveries in technique.
Against these contentions there are three objections to be made.
In the first place it is known that Gauguin, during his stay in
Martinique in 1887, painted pictures that are undeniably essays in
syntheticism. Martinique showed Gauguin the impossibility of
painting tropic sunlight by means of the Impressionistic division of
tones. Always purely intuitive as an artist, Gauguin began to
realize at Martinique, however vaguely, that one cannot reproduce
the natural decomposition of light by the artificial decomposition of
color attempted by Pissarro and the other Impressionists. He
therefore sought to translate sunlight into color by simplifying and
exaggerating the contrast of colors.
In the second place, Bernard's argument leaves unexplained why it
was not he, but Gauguin, who after 1888 painted those magnificent
pictures Le Christ Jaune, Le Christ Vert and La Vision après le
Sermon[4] and carved the two superb bas-reliefs Soyez
Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses.
Moreover, the careful reader of Van Gogh's letters to his brother
will find that throughout '88 and '89 Bernard stood in relation to
Gauguin as a pupil to a master. Finally, even if Bernard's
contention be partially true and if his own essays did induce
Gauguin to reject the last vestiges of Impressionism, his story fails
to account for the masterly grasp of Synthetic Symbolism shown by
Gauguin immediately after their second meeting.
It is quite impossible to trace to Cézanne's essays in Synthetic
Impressionism the more severely linear and decorative design of
either Bernard or Gauguin. Cézanne, later on, even went so far as
to assert that Gauguin had misunderstood him. Therefore it is clear

43
that the opinions of A.S. Hartrick and of Maurice Denis better fit the
facts. Gauguin was the sole originator of the Synthetic style. That
style was derived, perhaps mainly, from the careful study of
thirteenth century glass, which does perfectly what Gauguin
wished to do: translate the effect of sunlight into luminous color.
But it was also derived from Egyptian painting, Byzantine mosaics
and the Kakemonos of the Japanese. In short, it was as complete
a rejection of Impressionism as possible and a return to the linear
arabesque and decorative spacing of balanced color and form
practiced by the primitives of all times and preserved, in the
nineteenth century, in the works of artists whom Gauguin admired:
Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas.
[1] "Post-Impressionism," by A.S. Hartrick. Imprint, May, 1913.
[2] Paris, l'Occident, 1912.
[3] Paris, Vollard, 1911.
[4] Now known as La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange.

44
 III
The exhibition at the Café Volpini brought notoriety to Gauguin.
Various young artists, wearying of the academic "receipt for art"—
the phrase is Gauguin's—which they were being taught in the
ateliers of Paris, took the road for Pont-Aven. Among these were
Paul Sérusier, Chamaillard, and the Dutchman, De Haahn.
Acting under the influence of these, and especially under that of
Sérusier, whose mind was metaphysical and filled with Neo-
Platonic mysticism, Gauguin attempted to become the teacher of a
definite doctrine. Hitherto he had been an artist of the type of
Ingres, working purely intuitively, with one eye upon tradition and
another upon nature. But his new pupils were eager for a theory, a
formula, and a formula this hater of the dogmatic attempted to
create.
Artists are singularly unhappy in their attempts to explain
themselves. Whistler is not the only example of an artist who might
have been greater had he not wasted so much time in controversy.
The public always takes too literally the efforts of an artist to
analyze his own methods. All art is a synthesis, and no artist can
be at the same time synthetic and analytical.
Gauguin was no exception to this rule. Take for example, his often-
quoted statement about the use of primary colors:—
"Always use colors of the same origin. Indigo is the best basis. It
becomes yellow in saltpeter, red in vinegar. You can obtain it at any
chemist's. Keep to these three colors."
Gauguin himself did not follow this precept. An examination of his
palette shows that it was arranged thus, from left to right:—
ultramarine, silver white, emerald green, veronese green, yellow
ochre, burnt sienna, yellow chrome, vermilion, and crimson lake.
No artist needs to be told that many of these colors are
dangerously fugitive, whether used pure or in mixture.

45
So with another celebrated saying: "Seek harmony and not
contrast, the agreement and not—the clash of color." This saying
not only goes contrary to the previously quoted remark on the use
of primary colors, but is opposed to those equally famous dicta:
"Does that trunk of a tree seem to you blue? Paint it as blue as
possible," and, "A mile of green, is more green than half a mile."
It is therefore more valuable to summarize the main lines of
Gauguin's teaching than to quote this or that paradoxical remark.
Gauguin was not a man holding a high-school debate on theory,
but a creator. He refused even to be called a decorator, he
preferred the title of artisan. He declared outright that he had no
technique. "Or perhaps I have one, but very vagabond, very
elastic, according to the way I feel when I awaken in the morning, a
technique which I apply to my own liking in order to express my
thought, without taking account of the truth of Nature, externally
apparent. People think nowadays that all the technical means of
painting are exhausted. I do not believe it, if I am to judge by the
numerous observations which I have made and put into practice....
Painters have still much to discover."
Gauguin therefore boldly called his pupils anarchists and left to
them this remark: "Do what you please, so long as it is intelligent."
This did not prevent him from having a great respect for art
tradition. He knew that tradition is not a "recipe for making art," but
the sum-total of collective human intelligence working in the past
on the same problems that face the artists of to-day. He realized
that the essential substance of art is always the same. Art is an
eternal renewal of this substance. "The artist is not born of a single
unity. If he adds a new link to the chain already begun, it is much.
The artist is known by the quality of his transposition."
The "transposition" that he himself strove for may be clearly read in
his pictures. He strove incessantly for a renewal of the decorative
art of the great Venetians, by blending the Venetian glow of color
with the calm line of Primitive and especially of Egyptian Primitive
design. His problem was essentially the same as that of Puvis de
Chavannes, the problem of how to cover a flat wall space with
design and color so as to leave it still essentially a wall and not, as
Veronese and Tiepolo left it, an optically deceptive piece of stage-
scenery. Puvis had solved the problem by the artificial means of

46
lowering his scale of colors and by simplifying his drawing.
Gauguin solved his by the elimination of modeling, and of
graduations of tone, and by reducing his drawing to the strongest
possible arabesque of outline. In everything he sought for the
essential form, the form that contains all the other inessential
forms. As Sérusier puts it: "The synthetic theory of art consists in
reducing all form to the smallest possible number of component
forms:—straight lines, arcs of a circle, a few angles, arcs of an
ellipse." And to express this form he sought for the most
harmonious balance of color. Maurice Denis says:—"Recall that a
picture, before being a war-horse, a nude or some anecdote, is
essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain
order."

Tahitian Women.
Therefore and above all, Gauguin told his pupils not to draw from
the model, but from memory. He admitted that it was useful for
young painters to have a model, as all knowledge of facts could
only be obtained from the study of models. But he added that it
was better to draw a curtain before the model while painting it. One

47
of his pupils declared: "We went into the country to paint
seascapes and to the seashore to do landscapes."
Gauguin's teaching in this respect exactly agrees with the methods
practiced for centuries by the great Chinese and Japanese
painters. He would have enjoyed that story of a Chinese painter,
who was sent out by the Emperor to paint the most celebrated
landscape views in the Empire, and who returned without having
painted anything. When the Emperor asked him: "But where are
your pictures?" he replied: "I have them here"—and pointed to his
forehead. Gauguin, with his hatred of copying either from nature or
from the masters of the past, would also have appreciated the
Chinese idea of a "copy"—a free rearrangement of old material
according to one's temperament.
Lastly, he counseled his pupils not to paint movement but repose.
"Let everything you do breathe peace and calm of soul. Avoid all
animated attitudes. Each of your figures should be perfectly static.
Give everything a clear outline." This counsel sounds strange to
ears deafened by the tumult of modern life and by the clamorous
theories of Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. But to Gauguin it was
the basis of his own mystical religion. He gave it to the world,
however, not for this reason, but because he realized that painting
to be decorative must be architectural. He himself was a builder,
an artisan. In Brittany he painted the walls and windows of the inn
where he lived; he made furniture, carved and ornamented a pair
of wooden sabots for himself, worked at bas-reliefs, decorated
pottery. Movement, restlessness, would have but troubled the lines
of that ideal building, which, even then, he was erecting in his
dreams.
Such was the doctrine of Paul Gauguin. It may seem strange that
such ideas could have ever been considered revolutionary. In the
Far East at all events, they had been the commonplaces of art for
centuries. Revolutionary or not, Gauguin went on his way
undisturbed. From an examination of his letters, and of the
statements of those who knew him, the fact emerged that this
"anarchist" preserved throughout his life a great respect for artists
of the past. Rembrandt especially, in his mystical and visionary
phase, appealed to him and Rembrandt's influence may be traced
in more than one of Gauguin's Tahitian pictures. Velazquez,

48
Rubens, Proudhon, Corot, Whistler—Gauguin was able to learn
something from all these men as well as from Memling and
Holbein. As for his pupils, the measure of the intelligence they
displayed in following his precepts may be judged by the fact that
Gauguin remarked about one of them: "His faults are not
sufficiently accentuated for him to be considered a master," and by
the fact that the first synthetic picture of another was, according to
Maurice Denis, painted on the lid of a cigar box!

49
 IV
It is in the works of this period that we must seek for a solution of
Gauguin's mystic doctrine and for an explanation of the struggle
that went on in his soul: a struggle that was solved finally by his
denial of civilization and affirmation of pagan savagery at Tahiti.
Gauguin, as has been seen, was not naturally but only deliberately
a teacher of others. Especially in his intimate and personal
concerns, he commonly guarded an air of defiant reserve. In the
matter of views on art, he contented himself with the expression of
dogmatic and paradoxical opinions which, if disputed, were merely
affirmed with greater violence.
It is related of him that, if any one persisted in holding an opinion
contrary to his own, Gauguin would reply only by an oblique glance
from those cold gray eyes an answer that usually reduced the
speaker to an embarrassed silence.
Nevertheless, we owe to the fortunate preservation of various
fragmentary notes, made in the solitude of his last desperate
years, indications of what Gauguin's religious and political opinions
were. Here are some of them:—
"If I gaze before me into space, I have a vague sense of the
Infinite; nevertheless I am the conclusion of something that has
been begun. I understand then, that there has been a beginning
and that there will be no end.
"In this I do not possess the explanation of a mystery, but merely
the mysterious sense of this mystery—and this sensation is
intimately linked to the belief in an eternal life, promised by Jesus.
"But then, if we in ourselves are not the beginning when we come
into the world, it is necessary to believe, with the Buddhists, that
we have always existed.
"A change of skin.
"All this is very strange.

50
"The unfathomable mystery remains what it has always been and
what it is, unfathomable. God does not belong to the scholar, the
logician. He belongs to the poets, to their dreams. He is the symbol
of Beauty, Beauty itself."
From these and other jottings we can understand what was
passing in Gauguin's mind when he painted the pictures: Le Christ
Jaune and Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers; when he carved the
contrasted bas-reliefs: Soyez Amoureuses and Soyez
Mystérieuses; when he drew the lithographs: La Cigale et les
Fourmis, and Léda which bears the defiant inscription "Honi soit
qui mal y pense."
Gauguin was a mystic who sought instinctively for religious
illumination, not in the systems of philosophers and theologians,
but in nature and in man. Among the higher types of civilized man
he saw only a false system of morality, politics and religion, which
elevated the wealthy above the level of the rest of humanity and
forbade to the thinker, the artist, the independent workman, the
very right to live.
Against the organized materialism of the nineteenth century, he
recognized in Jesus Christ a revolt and a protest; but a revolt and a
protest that had failed. Humanity had not yet produced, save by
exception, the higher type of man, the man capable of "selling all
and giving to the poor," the man chosen "to enter the Kingdom of
Heaven." A terrible epoch, he foresaw, was coming in Europe for
the next generation: an epoch where the tyranny of money would
destroy mankind.
Therefore, in contemplating Christ, he was moved by a sense of
despair, of the futility of this sacrifice. His attitude to Christianity
became purely Protestant. Across his pictures there moves no
gracious shadow of the beneficent Virgin, sharing with humanity
the joys and sorrows of maternity.
In Le Christ Jaune he gives us the symbol of a faith which has
proved impotent to elevate mankind to its level. Le Christ au Jardin
d'Oliviers echoes the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" The terrible little picture, Les Misères Humaines
sums up in its two figures the despair and hypocrisy of our vaunted
civilization. Even the later Tahitian Birth of Christ renders nothing

51
but the physical anguish and exhaustion of maternity. In the Ia
Orana Maria, or the Salutation to Mary, the Virgin is represented
merely as a happy human mother.
Nature, on the other hand, seen by him luxuriant and unfettered,
as at Martinique, taught him the uselessness of revolt, struggle and
effort, the need of fatalism, of resignation. He grew to believe that
man was better, more rational, more harmonious when no longer
struggling against the inexorable laws of birth, begetting, and
death. Thus in his art he aimed at repose, the quietism of the
Buddhists. His knowledge of Buddhism was not deep—indeed in
his eyes, Buddhism, too, was a vain revolt against nature—but his
respect for Buddhistic doctrine remained greater than his respect
for Christianity. At the bottom of his soul there dwelt an old, old
thought, the essence of all paganism: "Eat, drink and be merry, for
to-morrow we may die."
As he put it later in the pages of his Tahitian recital:—
"To the eyes of Tagatha (the God) the most splendid glories of
kings and their ministers are but dust and spittle:
"To his eyes, purity and impurity are like the dance of the six
serpents:
"To his eyes, the search for the Way of Buddha is like the coming
of flowers."
It is only by meditating long on this disillusioned mysticism of a
man who was never more than half an European, that we are able
to understand how the same mind could have conceived the
exasperated sensuality of the bas-relief, Soyez Amoureuses et
vous serez Heureuses and the somber despair of Le Christ au
Jardin d'Oliviers. That mind, as we have seen, was neither wholly
Christian or Pagan—though the untamed Pagan element in it was
destined slowly to get the better of the more refined Christian side.
Therefore it is useless to ask ourselves whether Gauguin as an
artist, displayed more of the Classic tradition than of the Gothic.
Gothic as well as Classical strains remained mingled in him up to
the last. Throughout his work there runs a longing—obscure,
tormented, and ultimately foiled—for a natural religion: a religion

52
that would reconcile man with nature in one harmony, a religion,
which, like the rest of his striving, would be a synthesis.

53
 V
By the end of the year 1889, Gauguin's name had acquired a
certain renown, and he naturally gravitated back to Paris. Being
however still without resources, he took residence once more with
Emile Schuffenecker.
At that period, the literary and artistic school which had produced
naturalism and impressionism was growing rapidly old-fashioned.
Paris was on the verge of her æsthetic nineties. A small group of
writers, chief of whom were Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Huysmans,
had proclaimed a sort of revolt against the nineteenth century, and
had been, in consequence of their love for the remote past, at first
labelled Decadents. This title was soon abandoned for the better
designation of Symbolists.
Gauguin appeared to the smaller fry of Symbolism as a sort of
hero. Here was a man whose revolt was something not fictitious.
He had definitely broken away from his own commercial
surroundings. He had defiantly ruptured his own family ties. He
had abolished Impressionist science and had sought to restore art
to its primitive condition, revealing in the process the inexhaustible
strength and vitality of peasant and popular art. His appearance
amongst them, in a sailor's jersey, a sailor cap, sailor's trousers,
and carved wooden shoes, excited a sensation. He became to the
facile crowd of hero-worshipers and hangers-on, a sort of symbol.
Some critics have stated that Gauguin's head was turned by this
adulation, but in reality, under a new veneer of affectation, he
remained what he had always been. No man was less fitted for
living in the midst of cultivated society than he. For a time, during
that strange epoch of his financial career, he had indeed become,
to outward seeming, largely an European; but this was merely on
the surface and had completely vanished in the course of his later
vagabondage. An invincible shyness and indisposition to reveal
himself to others were in him, masked by an appearance of sullen
reserve and discourtesy. This shyness disappeared when he was
with children, peasants, or natives. But to every one else Gauguin

54
attempted to be as rude as possible, in order to keep them at a
distance. And, generally, he succeeded.
It is small wonder then that Schuffenecker shortly found his guest
again intolerable, and that Gauguin had to seek out a more modest
lodging. Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to
have realized that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth
while trying to love and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the
one thing that was ever likely to bring him fame, the reputation
which his studio had already acquired in the eyes of certain
amateurs, as housing Gauguin's collection of pictures and
sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon.
Gauguin shortly found a better friend perhaps the only real friend
he ever had—who was willing to give him the use of a studio. This
was Daniel de Monfreid, who had, incidentally, under the name
George Daniel taken part in the Volpini exhibition.
It is worthy of note that what brought them together was not a
community of taste in matters of art, but a common love of the sea.
De Monfreid, like Gauguin, had been a sailor. He was a man
enjoying a certain competence who had taken to yachting as an
amusement. Every summer, he dropped his palette and brushes,
put on his master mariner's cap, which he had won after an
apprenticeship aboard a coasting vessel, and set forth in his own
schooner of thirty-six tons for a cruise in the Mediterranean. This
went on for years until de Monfreid, weary of dodging quarantine
restrictions, and getting entangled in the complications of maritime
law, retired from the sea, generously offering his schooner to the
Naval School at Cette, where she ultimately met her end. At this
period he was known to his artistic friends in Paris as "the captain,"
and had been introduced to Gauguin by Schuffenecker, on the
former's return from Martinique in 1887.
To this man all lovers of Gauguin's art owe an immense debt.
Whether it was due to the independent and roving disposition,
shared by both, or to their common love and experience of the sea,
or to the fact that both were painters (de Monfreid's experiences in
the Mediterranean had made of him a good colorist), or to a certain
bond of savage frankness and nomad primitiveness to which all
the rest of their common tastes were due, is unknown. The fact

55
remains that the friendship between them was of that ideal kind
that is never broken: the friendship between the creator and helper,
which all artists long for and to which so few attain. In finding de
Monfreid, Gauguin experienced almost the last stroke of good
fortune that he was to have in life. The last stroke of all came a
little afterwards when, in the year after accepting de Monfreid's
hospitality, he suddenly decided to leave Europe for Tahiti.

56
 Hina Maruru (Feast to Hina).
The happy discovery of a letter which Gauguin wrote at this time
to a Danish painter, Willemsen by name, clears up the long-vexed
point of what induced him to take this decision.[1] He chanced to
attend, or to read the report of, a lecture on Tahiti, given by a
certain Van der Veere. Van der Veere apparently pitched the tone
of his discourse to suit the tastes of a fashionable audience. He
pictured Tahiti as a terrestrial paradise where money was

57
unknown. "Under a sky without winter, upon an earth of a
marvelous fertility, the Tahitian has only to lift his hands to gather
in his food; so he never works. For him life means singing and
making love." It is easy to picture the effect of such phrases on the
mind of a born lover of repose like Gauguin. Tahiti held out the
hope that Martinique had failed to realize; the hope that he might
be the first painter of the tropics. Gauguin's imagination was fired
by the idea. He declared that he intended to quit Europe and live
in Tahiti henceforward. There he could perhaps forget all the
hardships of the past, and die forgotten by Paris, happy and free
to paint "sans gloire aucune pour les autres." And if his children
could join him there, all the better—his isolation would then be
complete.[2]
The young Symbolists of course shouted "Bravo!" at the news of
the proposed voyage. Tahiti! Another symbol! They had already
spoilt Gauguin sufficiently for serious art, by persuading him to
embark on various symbolistic enterprises, such as the production
of a masterpiece entitled Loss Of Maidenhood, which has
fortunately vanished, and an etching representing Mallarmé with
Poe's Raven in the background. Perhaps their eagerness to see
Gauguin safely embarked for Tahiti only concealed a growing
boredom with their idol of yesterday.
At all events Gauguin was fêted, wined, dined. Thirty of his works
were auctioned off at the Hôtel Drouot, producing the small sum of
nine thousand six hundred and eighty francs. The Government
consented to make his voyage to Oceania an official "artistic
mission," on condition that this did not involve them in a
responsibility for the expenses. A banquet was held at the Café
Voltaire, where all the Symbolists were assembled. Gauguin has
left some ironical observations on this or on a similar banquet,
which show clearly his opinion of the ceremony. Finally a benefit
performance was given by the Théâtre d'Art for the departing artist
and also for Verlaine, then rapidly sinking into the squalor of his
last years.[3]
The most interesting fact about the performance was that,
included in the program by a strange stroke of irony, Maurice
Maeterlinck's play L'Intruse made on this occasion its first
appearance on the stage. Death walked the stage before

58
Gauguin's eyes, as if to show him what to expect. And yet he did
not draw back.
On the fourth of April 1891, Gauguin, abandoning Paris, started
on his voyage of discovery to Tahiti. Morice, in his interesting book
on Gauguin, declares that when the decision was irrevocably
made, and the mission to Tahiti had been stamped with official
approval, Gauguin's self-possession momentarily abandoned him,
and he broke down, and wept. And when Morice asked the
reason, he replied in these strange, tragic, touching words:—
"Listen to me.... I have never known how to keep alive both my
family and my thought. I have not even been able, up to now, to
keep alive my thought alone. And now that I can hope for the
future, I feel more terribly than I have ever felt, the horror of the
sacrifice I have made, which is utterly irreparable."
With this knowledge in his heart, Gauguin abandoned civilization.
[1] Les Marges, Paris, May 15, 1918.
[2] Gauguin had also undoubtedly read Loti's book. His letters
show that before deciding upon Tahiti he had considered the
possibility of going to Tonkin or Madagascar.
[3] It may be noticed that Gauguin received no financial profit
whatever from this performance, and Verlaine very little.

PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-

1895
I
Tahiti, the largest of the French Society Islands, lies in the South
Pacific Ocean. That is about the limit of the average person's
knowledge. Many perhaps understand vaguely that the climate is
tropical but modified by sea breezes, the scenery wonderful, the
people famous for beauty and licentiousness. Nevertheless, a
more thorough knowledge of the island's mysterious racial story
could not fail to interest. Tahiti, Samoa (known to us through

59
Stevenson), Hawaii, New Zealand and the Marquesas (familiar to
readers of Melville's "Omoo"), which are the chief links in that
story, were all, at the time the islands were discovered, inhabited
by the same people and a people utterly different in appearance
from the woolly-haired Papuans of New Guinea and Fiji, or from
the straight-haired Malays of the peninsula, made familiar to us
through the stories of Joseph Conrad. These island people, the
Polynesians, were found speaking all the same tongue, though in
different dialects; they had, for the most part, the same social
organization and their religion, manners and customs were very
similar; they had, in many cases, traditions pointing to a common
place of origin in the island of Samoa. And yet from Samoa they
lived separated by thousands of miles of intervening ocean, still
imperfectly known, abounding in coral reefs, liable to dangerous
storms, full of shifting currents. How then had they reached Tahiti?
The anthropologists assure us that the race is physically a branch
of the Caucasian or Indo-European. Though their skin is dark, it is
for the most part less dark than that of the natives of India. Set a
Maori soldier from New Zealand beside an Indian cavalryman and
note the difference between the clear yellow skin of the former,
which seems to give out light and the swarthy, somber brown of
the latter. In other characteristics too the Polynesians are
essentially Caucasian. They are a tall, well built, massive race,
contrasting favorably with the Malay. Their hair is black—or in
some cases copper brown—and wavy, again contrasting with the
straight hair of the Malay or the fuzzy mop of the Papuan. Finally,
the cast of face is purely Caucasian and in many cases very
beautiful. Only the nose appears abnormally broad and flat, due to
artificial flattening in infancy.
We must suppose then, that at some period unknown, but
probably after the Christian era (the folk-lore of Hawaii, which
must have been settled late, goes back to the fifth century) a
seafaring race of Indo-European stock set sail from some part of
the Indian peninsula in decked ships, capable of carrying one or
two hundred persons and provisions for a voyage of some weeks.
(We know the Polynesians were capable of building such ships.)
From India they made their way to the Malay peninsula, where
traces of their passing still exist, and so gradually to Samoa,
whence they spread northwards to Hawaii, southwards to New

60
Zealand, eastwards to Tahiti, to the Marquesas and to Easter
Island. In order to accomplish all this, their seafaring enterprise,
warlike energy and astronomical knowledge must have been
great. Later on, under the influence of too luxuriant a climate, the
Polynesians became indolent, careless, effeminate. And, as such,
they were discovered by the enterprising Anglo-Saxon, by the
Frenchman with his Parisian vices, by the thorough and scientific
German. The combined influences of missionaries, drink, disease
and the labor market reduced the inhabitants from 150,000 in
1774 to 10,000 in 1889.
To these people came Paul Gauguin, unwitting of the tragedy of
their history. It is true that he was weary of Europe and had set out
with the aim he had cherished since the Martinique days—to be
the first painter of the tropics. But it is probable that he chose
Tahiti at hazard, because he believed that here was a country
where one could live for almost nothing. It must always be
remembered that Gauguin had no private means and that his
pictures, like all works in advance of their time, did not sell.
Cezanne, Degas, could afford not to sell their pictures because
they had other resources. But Gauguin was forced to find some
way of existing while producing pictures that, as he knew well, it
would take the public some time to accept. In a letter to de
Monfreid he stated his system: "From the beginning, I knew that
this would be a life from day to day; so, logically, I habituated
myself to it. Instead of losing my strength in work and worry for the
moment, I put all my strength into the day—like the wrestler who
does not employ his body except in the moment of wrestling.
When I lie down in the evening I say to myself: One more day is
gained, perhaps to-morrow I shall be dead. In my work as a
painter, ditto—I do not trouble about anything, but each day for
itself—at the end of a certain time, this covers a considerable
extent of surface. If men would not waste their time in
disconnected struggles and labors! Every day a link. That is the
great point."
Such was the frame of mind in which Gauguin went to Tahiti. What
he found there was not the "Pays de Cocaigne" he probably
expected. The Gods do not give their gifts in this fashion. Gauguin
asked much from Tahiti and much was given. But he asked for
material comfort and was offered instead spiritual salvation. In

61
Tahiti, Paul Gauguin found, at last, his soul; and the work that he
achieved there, though it brought him in no material fortune, was
to stand and speak to later ages, its own terrible parable to all
men.

II
On the night of the eighth of June 1891, after sixty-three days of
voyaging, Gauguin at last arrived at Papeete, the capital of Tahiti.
He was at the time suffering from bronchitis, contracted during the
last winter in Paris, and within a few days of his arrival was
obliged to take to his bed.
He was now within a few days of his forty-third birthday. Although
possessed of a normally strong constitution, fortified by the open-
air existence of his youth and by various athletic exercises, such
as boxing, fencing and swimming, of which he was very fond, his
health, when he reached Tahiti, became immediately worse. This
was largely due to his constant over-indulgence in tobacco and
partly also to the privations which he had endured throughout his
five years' struggle for livelihood.
His prospects were not brilliant. The governor, Lacascade, an
ignorant and brutal negro, learning that he had an official mission,
at once took him for a spy sent out from Paris, and by every
possible means attempted to hinder his getting into contact with
the degraded and exploited native population. The society of the
pseudo-European capital, Papeete, disgusted him. The natives of
the interior were suspiciously hostile to all whites.
A few days after his arrival a public event occurred which roused
his interest. It was the death of the last male representative of the
old royal house of Tahiti, Pomare V, the son of the unfortunate
Queen Pomare, who had vainly struggled to enlist Great Britain's
sympathy in her opposition to the French occupation. Pomare V
had abdicated eleven years previously; now he was dead and,
with his death, the last dying gleams of Tahitian hopes for
independence became extinct.

62
Pomare was buried in the uniform of a French Admiral, with full
official ceremony and according to the rites of Christianity; but in
the attitude of the natives to this event, Gauguin was able to see
that the embers of paganism still smoldered in the island and were
ready to revive at any favorable opportunity.
He decided to quit Papeete and to hire in the interior a hut—a
process which went far to exhaust his small capital. There he
attempted to live as a native and to get in touch with the
inhabitants. This made still further inroads on the nine thousand
francs he had brought away with him from France. The natives
held aloof, suspicious; they were only ready to approach him and
to act as models at the sight of provisions, liquor, money. His
efforts to get into closer touch with them were met only by
enigmatic and evasive smiles.
Nevertheless Gauguin persisted. Though we must regard the
account given by himself in the pages of "Noa Noa" as
representing rather the dream than the reality, he undoubtedly
made a brave attempt to persuade the natives to accept him as
one of their own kind. But, unfortunately, the natives had seen
thousands of Europeans before him, either voyagers of the Pierre
Loti type or commercial exploiters looking upon them as "dirty
Kanakas." They now had their revenge in the only way possible to
a conquered race. They spent his money, flattered his painting
and his vanity, and smiled behind his back.
Before a year was out his capital had vanished. There were no
buyers for his pictures on the island and Paris was far away.
Gauguin found that he had suddenly aged—a common
experience enough for white men coming suddenly into a tropic
climate. His heart began to give him trouble. This savage Eden,
which the white men had found and corrupted, was taking its little
revenge.
He attempted to persuade the governor to furnish funds for his
passage back to France. In vain. He hoped that buyers for his
pictures would come forward in Paris. Useless. Fortunately his
fame was now spreading to neutral countries. Thanks to his wife's
efforts he was invited to take part in an exhibition in Denmark.

63
 The Old Spirit.
On the eighth of December, 1892, he forwarded a packet of eight
pictures to this exhibition, among which was the superb canvas
L'Esprit Veille. The picture created an immense stir at
Copenhagen when exhibited the next year and brought him in
some money. But in Paris his fame steadily declined and he was
every day less talked about.

64
Albert Aurier, a young critic who had written in his favor and
helped to make his art known, was dead. Theodore Van Gogh,
who had supported him and had attempted to find buyers for his
work, had followed his unfortunate brother into the grave.
Meanwhile his pupils of yesterday, Bernard, Sérusier and the rest,
were going about Paris vaguely hinting that they had taught
Gauguin something and that Cézanne and Van Gogh were better
artists. The halo of victory which had crowned his departure from
Paris was rapidly fading.
He had painted already at Tahiti, as he knew, magnificent pictures
—pictures better than anything he had done before. Moreover, he
believed that he could now paint others from memory as well in
Paris as elsewhere. What he had seen in Tahiti had given him the
necessary material upon which his imagination, always synthetic
and non-realistic, could work. His health and his future prospects
could only suffer by a longer stay. He believed that in returning to
Paris he could make himself once and for all an outstanding
figure. If he did not, perhaps it would be better to give up painting
altogether. He was growing old.
On the thirtieth of August 1893, he arrived at Marseilles with four
francs in his pocket, after a terrible voyage in the steerage, in the
height of summer, during which three unfortunate passengers died
of heat in the Red Sea. It is almost incredible to think of, that this
man, during the two years he had been away from France, had
painted, despite failing health, and financial miseries, over forty
canvases, among them such masterpieces as L'Esprit Veille,
Matamua, and Ia Orana Maria. And yet this very same man
arrived back in France a pauper! Truly, he might well say of
himself, that he was born with the evil eye, which brings to its
owner, as well as others, only misfortune.

III
Paris has been for a century the most fickle and cruel city in the
world. Since her spoiled darling Napoleon fell, there has been no
one to whom she is willing to grant her favors for more than a day.

65
There are a few exceptions to this rule. Hugo, because he lived in
exile; Balzac, because he, too, was a hermit, continually pestered
by his creditors; and of recent years Verlaine, because he haunted
the lowest cafés, the vilest dens, and only emerged from these to
go into a hospital or a prison. Such men may be the idols of Paris.
For the rest, Paris is willing only to think of her children as sons for
a day.
Gauguin returned, picturing a complete conquest of Paris. But he
had already enjoyed the brief hour of glory that was to be his.
Had he but managed his affairs more wisely, he might, on the
strength of the sensation his pictures had created in Denmark and
subsequently in Sweden, Norway, and Germany, have now
concluded with a picture-dealer an arrangement enabling him to
obtain a small fixed sum every year for his work. But Gauguin
demanded all or nothing! And, as was the case before with his
mother and her Peruvian relatives, the result was nothing.
He decided to give a general exhibition of his entire Tahitian work,
forty-four pictures and two pieces of sculpture. Durand-Ruel gave
him a gallery and Charles Morice, chief of the young symbolists
whom Gauguin had met after the Volpini show, wrote a preface to
the catalog, which probably only served to mystify the public still
further.
For the effect of the exhibition on public and press was to produce
frank bewilderment. Of the forty-four pictures exhibited, thirty-
three remained unsold. What misled visitors more than anything
else were the titles that Gauguin had seen fit to attach to his
pictures. These titles were in the Tahitian language. Every one
immediately supposed that in order to understand the pictures, it
was necessary to be expert in the history, the folk-lore, the
manners and customs of Tahiti. Naturally therefore the pictures
seemed to be mere archæological and ethnological puzzles, only
to be read by those possessing the key.
Gauguin, of course, had intended something else. Just as he had
used Brittany to suggest the somber passion and suffering of
Christ, so he had used Tahiti to suggest the primal innocence, the
enigmatic mystery of life as it was lived in Eden and in the days of
man's awakening—in that Golden Age dreamed by every great

66
poet and every great painter. But it was useless for him to try to
explain that Tahiti had merely given him material out of which his
imagination had evolved pictures.
Morice pictures him standing at the exhibition, day after day, and
listening with perfect composure to the stupid remarks and
laughter of the crowd. It was, as he later said of himself, the
torture of the Indian who smiles at the stake. Only Degas came
and understood. To him on the last day of the exhibit, Gauguin
said: "Monsieur Degas, you have forgotten your cane," and taking
down a cane he himself had sculptured handed it to the
astonished painter.
The bitterness of sheer starvation would assuredly have been his,
had not fortune, with sly mockery and with perhaps a desire to
save Gauguin for better things, sent him means of salvation. A
brother of his father died in Orleans, well-to-do and a bachelor.
From his estate, Gauguin inherited thirteen thousand francs.
The exhibition had been a mistake, but his next move was sheer
folly. Instead of reflecting calmly upon his situation, he rented a
studio and determined to make one more attempt to impress and
startle Paris. Morice admits that this was done at the insistence of
his so-called friends. If this was the case Gauguin would have
done well had he uttered the well-known prayer, "Deliver me from
my friends!" For Morice, even, admitted later that it was, under the
circumstances, a mistake.
About Gauguin's studio and his life at this period the legends have
grown with the years. It is undoubtedly a fact that his walls were
colored pale yellow, and his windows painted with Tahitian
subjects in imitation of stained glass (these same windows were,
by the way, on exhibition at a dealer's in Paris a few years ago). It
is true that his rooms were decorated with trophies, boomerangs,
wooden clubs, spears. It is true that he kept a monkey and a
model, a mulatto woman who is said to have come from Java and
who was certainly more of a trial to him than anything else. It is
true also that he wore a strange costume, consisting of a long
blue riding coat with pearl buttons, a blue waistcoat embroidered
yellow, brown pantaloons, and a gray slouch hat with a blue
ribbon. But the importance of these and of similar details is very

67
slight. Gauguin has been dead now for some years and it is time
that the recollection of these pitiable attempts to attract the
attention of heedless Paris were dead also and forgotten.
Despite this parade of self-satisfied vanity, Gauguin found himself
ill-at-ease. The facile adulation of the symbolists, who frequented
the tea-parties he gave at his studio, could not hold him. He
wandered off to Bruges, where he remained rapt with admiration
before Memling and astounded, half-overwhelmed by the brutal
energy of Rubens. He lost interest in the new pupils who offered
themselves, Seguin and O'Connor. After a vain attempt to get a
post from the Government as a resident in Oceania, he again
drifted back to Pont-Aven.
There, one day, promenading upon the beach with the persistent
mulatto model at his side, he was jeered at by some sailors. In a
moment, all his ridiculous artifices and carefully-studied poses
slipped from him. He was again a savage, fighting for the right to
exist in his own way. He attacked the sailors but they were too
many for him and one, slipping behind him, launched a well-aimed
kick and broke his leg at the shin.
The mulatto fled, took a train to Paris, entered the empty studio,
seized whatever she could lay her hands on and vanished. As for
Gauguin, he lay on a stretcher, uttering not a groan but stoically
rolling and smoking a cigarette.

IV
Little by little there had been dawning in his mind a vague
understanding; and now, as he lay on his bed in the inn at Pont-
Aven, this understanding became a conviction.
He saw and understood at last what it was that he had tried to
accomplish and why he had failed. He knew now what his art had
been; a great protest, an external manifestation of the inner revolt
that had gone on in his soul. What he had fought against was the
cunning extortion, the moral degradation, the bargaining
hypocrisy, of nineteenth century Europe. And nineteenth century

68
Europe had risen against him, was casting him out, was
destroying him. He must either submit or declare war, for the sake
of his life, his art, his soul.
Among the people of Tahiti, labeled contemptuously "savages" by
the very folk who had hampered the development of his art at
every opportunity, among these savages he knew that he had
found honor, courage, moral dignity, and disinterested kindness as
he had found them nowhere else. Among these oppressed and
exploited savages, there still survived vestiges of a civilization in
which art had its proper place in the scheme of things, as a means
to fuller and more joyous life and as a door opening upon the
mysteries of that beyond which neither scientists nor theologians
could ever pierce. Among these savages he had found a dark
subterranean hatred of the new civilization, which they knew to be
destroying them; and now he looked and saw the same hatred in
his own soul.
On September 20, 1894, he wrote to Daniel de Monfreid:—
"As you say, I have not given any news of myself recently and
every one is complaining. The reason is, you see, that I have lost
all my strength through suffering, above all at night, which I
frequently pass without any sleep. And into the bargain naturally I
have done nothing this infernal month except spend money. For
the rest, I have made a fixed resolve to go back and live always in
Oceania and shall return to Paris in December in order to occupy
myself exclusively in selling all my bazar at no matter what price.
If I succeed I shall leave as soon as possible in February. I can
then finish my days without care for the morrow and without the
external struggle against fools—Farewell to painting, except as a
means of distraction. My house will be in sculptured wood."
The resolve expressed by this letter was carried out. Gauguin
returned to Paris and threw the "bazar," as he called it, upon the
market. An auction sale was planned of the pictures remaining in
the studio. On his return from Tahiti, Gauguin had met August
Strindberg, then living in Paris. Strindberg had taken a certain
interest in his work and for a time the two men had lived together.
Gauguin now applied to him for a preface to the sale catalog. The

69
following letter was Strindberg's response and in its words we
read intellectual Europe's complaint against Gauguin:
"You insist absolutely upon having the preface for your catalog
which I wrote in remembrance of the winter 1894-5, when we
were living here, behind the Institute, not far from the Pantheon,
more important still, close to the Cemetery of Montparnasse! I
would have willingly given you this souvenir, to take away with you
to that isle of Oceania, where you wish to seek a decoration in
harmony with your powerful stature, and a breathing space, but I
feel myself in an equivocal position from the outset, and I respond
immediately to your request by an 'I cannot' or, more brutally, by
an 'I will not.'
... "I cannot grasp your art and I cannot love it—I know that this
avowal will neither astonish nor wound you, because you seem to
be only strengthened by the hatred of others; your personality,
careful to remain intact, is pleased by the antipathy that it arouses.
Perhaps with reason, for, from the instant when, approved and
admired, you obtain partisans, either they will rank you or classify
you or give to your art a name which the younger men shall have
used for five years to designate a super-annuated style of
painting.
... "It was of Puvis de Chavannes that I thought last night, when to
the southern sounds of mandolin and guitar, I saw on the walls of
your studio an uproar of sunlit pictures, which pursued me in my
sleep. I saw trees which no botanist will discover, animals
unsuspected by Cuvier and men which only you can create.
"A sea which pours forth from a volcano, a sky in which no God
can live—Sir, said I in my dream, you have created a new heaven
and earth, but I am not delighted in the midst of your creation. It is
too sunny for me; I prefer more chiaroscuro. And in your paradise
there lives an Eve who is not my ideal, because truly I, too, have a
feminine ideal or two!
"This morning, I went to the Luxembourg gallery to look at
Chavannes, who always comes back to my mind. I contemplated
with a profound sympathy his picture of the Poor Fisherman, so
attentively occupied in watching the boat, which brings him to the
faithful love of his spouse, and slumbering child. That is beautiful.

70
But it seemed to me this Fisherman wore a crown of thorns, and
that shocked me. For I hate Christ and all crowns of thorns. You
understand that I hate them. I do not desire this pitiful God who
accepts blows. My God is rather Vitsliputsli, who, in the sun, eats
the hearts of men.
"No, Gauguin is not formed from the work of Chavannes, nor from
that of Manet, nor from that of Bastien-Lepage.
"Who is he then? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates a
wearisome civilization; something of a Titan who, jealous of his
Creator, in his idle moments makes his own little creation; a child
who breaks up his toys to make others; he who denies and defies
the rabble, preferring to see the sky red, rather than blue, as they
do.

71
 Calvary.
"Bon voyage, Master: but come back here to me. I shall by that
time perhaps have learned to understand your art better, which
will permit me to make a true preface for a new catalog of a new
sale, since I am beginning also to feel an immense need for
becoming savage and creating a new world."
To this letter, Gauguin replied-with the following profession of faith:
—

72
"I have received to-day your letter; your letter, which is a preface
for my catalog. I had the idea of asking you for a preface, when I
saw you the other day in my studio playing the guitar and singing,
your blue northern eyes gazing attentively at the pictures on the
walls. I had then the presentiment of a revolt, of a shock between
your civilization and my barbarism.
"You suffer from your civilization. My barbarism is to me a renewal
of youth.
"Before the Eve of my choice, which I have painted in forms and
harmonies of another world, your remembrances have perhaps
evoked a sorrow of the past. The Eve of your civilized conception
makes you and the rest of us almost always misogynists; the old
Eve, which in my studio frightens you, will perhaps smile at you
less bitterly some day. This world of mine, which neither a Cuvier
nor a botanist can find, will be a Paradise, which I shall have only
sketched out. And from the sketch to the realization of the dream
is very far. What matter? To envisage happiness, is that not a
foretaste of Nirvana?
"The Eve that I have painted, she alone, logically can remain
naked before one's eyes. Yours in that simple state could not walk
without shame, and too beautiful (perhaps), would be the
evocation of an evil and a sorrow."
In February, 1895, the pictures were sold bringing in twelve
thousand francs. And shortly after the artist shook the dust of
Europe from his feet and departed for his final voyage to Tahiti. As
Morice says, he left Paris with a smile, and without turning his
head to look back.

V
It was in the same spirit as that in which he quitted Europe finally,
that Gauguin set himself the task of writing the story of his life in
Tahiti. This story, which appears in the pages of the book he
entitled "Noa Noa" (a native word meaning "fragrant"), is at once
the best commentary on and the final analysis of his mind.

73
We do not know when Gauguin first conceived or executed the
part of the book that is his. It may have been during his long hours
of solitude on his first visit to the island; perhaps it was during his
stay in Paris; perhaps it was after his return. The part of the book
that is not his refers in passing to events that took place as late as
1897.
Gauguin wished to write the story of his conversion to savagery—
the conversion of a man who realized that he himself was tainted
with civilization, incapable of becoming more than half-a-savage,
yet realizing utterly that savagery was naked, healthy and sound,
while civilization was corrupt, over-luxuriant and decaying.
To accomplish this task, he sought for a style as free from literary
artifice as possible. His aim was to state what he had seen in
Tahiti, in the style of a folk-tale. He deliberately eschewed rhetoric,
exotic ornament, all the devices of the tourist, the journalist, the
professional litterature. What he wanted, above all, was to make
others feel, in the incidents of a naïve story, the essence of Tahiti
—the soul of the native.
It is therefore useless to ask whether the story of his return to
savagery told by Gauguin in this book, has any basis in fact or
whether it is largely allegory. It may be both or neither. It contains
certain undoubted facts: first, that Gauguin saw on his arrival at
Papeete the royal funeral and was struck by the attitude of the
natives to that event; second, that he quitted Papeete and
attempted to live as a native, abandoning European dress and
speech as far as possible; third, that in the course of his stay in
the island he entered into relations with one or more native
women; finally, that he quitted the island, owing to money troubles
and in the hope of obtaining a substantial triumph in France.
These facts are not important, and are merely the vague skeleton
upon which the fascinating story of Gauguin's spiritual
development is bit by bit, built up. He made use of these facts in
the same way as he made use of models in his pictures, as the
basis for the suggestion of beautiful forms. All art to him was
transposition, and in the pages of his recital he deliberately
attempted to transpose his opinions on civilization, savagery, and

74
life, into a series of imaginary adventures, which we are at liberty
to believe or not as we choose.
So we follow him from Papeete into the backwoods. We find him
holding aloof from the savages at first and marveling at their
simple hospitality. We see him making his first tentative attempts
at establishing a community of thought. He tries to persuade the
natives to sit for their portraits—with little success. He tries to find
solace in the companionship of the half-caste Titi, in vain. Then
Jotefa comes upon the scene, the young man whose body reveals
to him the hitherto unsuspected fact that civilization has only
accentuated differences of sex, and thereby rendered sex more
dangerous, more artificial, more unnatural. So he gets his first
gleam of intelligence. The next comes, when Jotefa declares that
he cannot touch the chisel, that an artist is not like other men, but
some one producing a thing useful to others. This further
enlightens him. He contrasts this opinion on art as something
useful to man with art as the European sees it, a mere freakish
amusement. Finally, he hazards everything. He takes a young
native girl and makes her his wife, not without qualms of fear. All
goes well until one day away from home, when he is out fishing
with the natives. They laugh at his luck. He asks them why.
Because his line has caught in the lower jaw of the fish and that is
a sign of a man's wife being unfaithful to him. He returns home,
half-believing the superstition. The native girl prays, weeps, asks
to be beaten. He cannot beat her. He can only forgive and
understand. So the story closes.
From such a story, we should naturally receive the impression that
Gauguin's life in Tahiti was ideally happy. But his letters reveal that
he was even more unhappy there than in France. So whatever
elements of fact may be in his story, it is evident that they cannot
be disentangled from the fictional details. It is better to take "Noa
Noa" altogether as a series of fictitious adventures, designed to
bring out the fact that Gauguin became, despite himself, as nearly
one with the natives as it is possible for any European to be. Thus
we see, bit by bit, the Tahitians claiming him as one of their own,
from the day that he is forced by necessity to accept their food
offered and at first scornfully refused, to the day when he finds
that he shares their superstitions and even their easy tolerance of
marital infidelity. If we look at the story in this light, it becomes an

75
allegory easily readable, an allegory of civilization going down
before primitive nature, expressed in a series of parables.
Unfortunately, Gauguin suspected that this story would seem too
bare and devoid of literary charm if he published it as it stood, and
he asked Charles Morice to collaborate. Morice thereupon wrote a
series of highly florid descriptions and poems, inspired by
Gauguin's pictures, in a style strongly tinged with the influence of
Stéphane Mallarmé. These poems and descriptions were
intercalated between the pages of Gauguin's recital.[1] The result
is that "Noa Noa" contains two books; the first Gauguin's, the
second, Morice's, and the reader is liable to be confused unless
he remembers that the sections by Gauguin are all headed "Le
Conteur Parle," and that these sections form by themselves a
continuous story. Morice's contributions can therefore be
disregarded.
It is perhaps better not to discuss whether or not these
contributions add anything to Gauguin's recital. Some people may
even prefer the glow of Morice's rhetoric to the naked blaze of
Gauguin's poetry. Gauguin himself philosophically remarked that
he wished Morice's work to stand beside his, in order that people
might observe the difference between a civilized decadent and a
naïve and brutal savage.
[1] They have been wisely omitted from the English translation.

PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION

1895-1903
I
With Gauguin's last return to Tahiti there opened for him the final
and most important phase of his life, the last stand of the savage
against encroaching civilization. The letters that he sent to de
Monfreid during this period are painful reading. They breathe the
weary cry of a man who knows that Fate's dice are loaded against
him, the complaint of a warrior who realizes that fighting is

76
useless, but who has no choice but to fight on. For Gauguin was
now exhausted by the struggle that he had carried on so long with
the world out-side and within himself. The wound in his leg, given
him by the sailors, had never properly healed; under the climate of
Tahiti, it reopened. Owing to the rash exposure of his skin to the
effects of tropical light, both legs were attacked by eczema. Night
after night was spent in sleepless pain. To add to his troubles, his
eyesight began to fail; nature was taking her revenge on him, was
wreaking upon his body retribution for the sins of which the white
race had been guilty in their dealings with the natives. It seemed
to him that the gods he worshiped had become his enemies.
Before leaving France, a number of friends had agreed to buy his
pictures, and assure him a steady income. These now withdrew
their support. He had leased a plot of ground in order to build the
house of sculptured wood which he dreamed of; the construction
of the house carried away his remaining capital. He was
everywhere fleeced, not only by the French colonists, but also by
the natives, who were growing more and more corrupt every day,
thanks to the happy influence of civilization. Even after his house
was built, he was not allowed to keep it in peace. The owner of
the ground died, leaving his affairs in a tangle; Gauguin was
forced to obtain another plot and to reconstruct the house, or see
it destroyed. This last he refused to do, so he was forced, finally,
to borrow money, a thing he had never done in his life before.
Towards the end of 1897, his situation grew even worse. His eyes,
now permanently inflamed, were so painful that he could not even
touch a brush. The tragic portrait of himself in profile, which he
sent about this time to de Monfreid, clearly reveals the condition of
his eyesight. De Monfreid had sent him colors, but these were
useless—he could not even exchange them for bread. And to add
to all he was in debt, more and more heavily, month after month.
De Monfreid wrote him encouragingly, tried to sell his pictures,
spoke of articles, of a press campaign on his behalf. The answer
was—"I only desire silence, silence and again silence. Let me die
in peace, forgotten, or if I ought to live, let me live in peace,
forgotten.... What matter if I am the pupil of Bernard or Sérusier? If
I have painted daubs, why set out to gild them, to deceive people
as to their quality?"

77
Early in 1898 his resolution was taken. Weary, exhausted, at the
end of his tether, he decided to meet death half-way. He finished a
large picture, a sort of strange allegory of despair, entitled D'où
venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous? and then took
arsenic. The dose was too strong and only brought about terrible
nausea, which recurred for some months afterwards whenever he
attempted to take food. Meanwhile his creditors menaced him with
the destruction of the house that had taken him so much trouble to
build.
In order to obtain food, he shortly afterwards returned to Papeete
and, at the age of fifty, took up a position as a shipping clerk at the
Board of Public Works, with a salary of six francs a day. To such
straits was he reduced, and yet he continued the fight. Can one
help admiring his tenacity?
Meanwhile, the devoted de Monfreid had been busy. He had
enlisted the interest of Degas, of Vollard and others, and had
succeeded in selling some of the artist's pictures. Gauguin might
now have counted upon a steady income, had he chosen to forget
past injuries. But with him, there was to be no compromise.
Because Bernard, Sérusier, Maurice Denis had made his theories
popular and had even claimed to have some influence on his
development, he refused either to be ranked with them or to
exhibit in their company. Of course he merely made himself more
unpopular in Paris by such conduct. But Gauguin's personality
was of a kind unable to endure the society of second-rate people.
He admired genius where he found it, in a few solitaries such as
Degas, Poe, Balzac, and Mallarmé. For ordinary society, he
preferred either natives or children. Nevertheless his pictures
were sold and, by de Monfreid's efforts, he found himself out of
debt in 1899 and able to return to his house, now in a deplorable
state of neglect and decay. Things seemed to improve a little,
though he was now permanently crippled by the disease of his
legs. He set himself once more to paint and to plant the flower
seeds which de Monfreid had sent, at his request, from France. Ill,
ruined in health and physique, a victim to drugs, he went onward
to his goal.

78
 Matamua (Olden Days).

II
It is difficult to judge fairly the next stage in Gauguin's career,
unless we remember that he had suffered so much from his
physical ailments, from the complete solitude in which he found

79
himself and from the terrible crisis of the previous year, that he
was afflicted for the time being with something closely resembling
persecutional mania. He had been driven to war on civilization
and he believed that some unknown power was now pursuing him
with its hatred. In his next stage, we find him turning even against
the natives.
On his return to Tahiti he had taken a young native girl aged
thirteen-and-a-half for wife, companion and model. She had
served him devotedly, had procured him food when he was unable
to walk, had nursed him in his illness. After his return to the house
from Papeete, she had resumed with him the old life and had
given birth to a child. Now, for some reason or no reason,
Gauguin suddenly took it into his head that she had robbed him,
and drove her out. The poor soul, however, returned and, as the
painter was by this time a helpless cripple, he attempted to call in
the law to enforce her removal, claiming that her return was a
violation of his domicile. Of course, the law did nothing.
This only further enraged Gauguin. He decided to attack the entire
colonial administration. Since his return, he had been everywhere
treated by the Europeans at Tahiti as a madman or fool. Now he
would get his revenge.
With the aid of a copying apparatus he set up and printed several
numbers of a paper called, first Les Guèpes, and later Le Sourire.
The contents of these papers have been printed and are the
poorest stuff that Gauguin ever wrote. But these crude gibes at
the governor and at the colonial administrations generally,
together with the equally crude caricatures that Gauguin drew of
prominent people in the colony, seem to have produced a stir.
People began to fear him at last; it was, for a moment, a triumph.
But Tahiti had by this time grown too civilized to hold him. A
railway had been built into the interior; the Protestant missionaries
grew every day more powerful; disease and drink were rapidly
carrying off the natives. Gauguin for a time thought of turning
doctor and even wrote to de Monfreid for medicines. But shortly
he found his own need of medicine as great as that of any of the
wretched natives. An epidemic of influenza struck the island and
the painter was obliged to take to the hospital, where he had to

80
pay twelve francs a day. To add to his griefs, the supply of food in
the island became scarce and prices ran up to an impossible
figure.
Hearing that life in the Marquesas Islands was cheaper, that the
natives there were physically more unspoilt, also that Europeans
were few and far between, he decided to quit Tahiti and install
himself in the island of Hiva-Hoa or Dominica. He hoped to find
there elements of a purer savagery and to paint with fresh
strength. This hope was destined to be realized only in part.
Gauguin's art is almost entirely associated with three spots,
Martinique, Brittany and Tahiti. He might have done better work at
other places, had he had the time, the opportunity or the strength.
In the case of his removal to the Marquesas it was the strength
that was lacking.
Traces of the exhaustion of his endurance and of the affection of
his eyes are to be found even in his latest Tahitian pictures. Owing
to his habit of dating his pictures, we can follow the failure of his
power. The first things that he painted after his return are, on the
whole, superior to the productions of 1891-93. The Te Arii Vahine
or Reclining Woman, of 1896 is finer in design even than the
L'Esprit Veille of 1892-3. The Youth Between Two Girls, La Case
(1897), the beautiful Navé Navé Mahana (Delightful Days) of
1896, with its feeling of a terrestrial paradise—these are
masterpieces of their kind. But the portrait of himself (1897)
already shows signs of inability to finish and remains a sketch,
albeit a powerful one. And with many of the succeeding works
there came a greater impatience, a greater carelessness, a more
hectic and feverish lack of control. The more savage Gauguin's
work grew, the less became his strength to produce it. One is
reminded of a similar case to his, that of the Irish dramatist,
Synge.
The Gauguin who sought solitude of far-off Hiva-Hoa was not the
Gauguin of ten years before. He was an extinct volcano, a
burned-out crater. And he was destined to find only death in this
last solitude. Nevertheless, before death came, his art attained its
final summit of expression. Pictures like the Jeune Fille à l'Eventail
(1902) or the magnificent Contes Barbares (also 1902) in which

81
the Marquesas type appears, are the last word of Gauguin's
gospel of beauty, the revelation of a new heaven and earth. The
flame burned clear in him just before the close—then the
shattered body yielded and all was darkness.

III
The Marquesas Islands are small and, in contrast to the coral and
basaltic formation of Tahiti, of volcanic origin. They lie about a
thousand miles nearer to the equator and this makes their climate
more humid and less supportable to white men. Owing to this fact,
and to the fact that they are out of the track of steamers between
San Francisco and Sydney, they have preserved more of their
unspoilt character.
The natives are said to be the finest in appearance of any
Polynesian peoples. In distinction to the Tahitians, who are either
red or olive brown, their skin is largely of a clear golden color. In
this they resemble the Maories of New Zealand, as in the practice
of face-tattooing common among the males. They were formerly
great fighters and ferocious cannibals, as Herman Melville's
"Omoo" tells us. The first white settlers amongst them were
French Roman Catholic missionaries who, by buying up most of
the valuable land, by discouraging the drink traffic and by
preventing other familiar colonial abuses, have succeeded in
preserving the native stock fairly well. The Marquesas have never
become the sink of vice and corruption which is Tahiti.
It was on the chief island of this group that Gauguin installed
himself. His capital enabled him to buy a plot of ground and to
start constructing another house. This, like his house in Tahiti, was
ornamented with bas-reliefs in wood and large decorative
paintings. In the garden, stood a rude clay statue—a sort of
combination of a Buddha and a Maori idol—under a canopy.
Gauguin called this statue Te Atua—the God, and was reported to
say his prayers to it every day. On the base of the statue were
engraved these words, taken from Morice's verses in "Noa Noa":

82
 "The Gods are dead and Tahiti dies of their death,
The sun, which once lit the isles with flame, now sleeps,
A sorrowful sleep, with brief dream wakenings:
Now the shadow of regret pierces the eyes of Eve,
Who pensively smiles, gazing upon her breast,
Sterile gold, sealed by some divine design."
Altogether in the Marquesas, Gauguin found a great charm and
repose. He seems to have rapidly established a great friendship
with the natives and to have looked upon himself as being a sort
of king. But his health was so bad that he was unable to leave the
house and but for one Chinese boy, he lived alone. He even
dreamed of abandoning the Marquesas (not because he was
weary of the place, but because he knew his strength was small)
and seeking a more favorable climate in Spain, where he thought
he might be able to paint.
Except for the constant trouble with his health, his only difficulty
was with the missionaries. With the exception of a few settlers,
they were the only whites on the islands. Gauguin had advanced
in savagery to such a point as to be unable to bear the presence
of white people. He refused to see that the Catholic Missionaries
had at least attempted to save the natives from the worse fate that
had befallen them under the Protestant Missionaries in Tahiti. The
insistence of the Catholics upon monogamy, upon European
dress, upon mission schools and religious observances infuriated
him. He made a statue of a nude woman and set it up in his
garden. The Bishop protested. Gauguin promptly made a
caricature in clay of the bishop, with horns on his head like the
Devil, and set it up facing the statue. Something of the old Gothic
love of the grotesque, something, too, of the typically Parisian
desire to "épater de bourgeois" remained in him to the last.
But this was not all. Gauguin was not the sort of man to end his
days in peace. Although de Monfreid had worked devotedly, his
position in France was still insecure; Vollard might at any moment
refuse to take more pictures to sell. The wound he had received
by his failure to impress Paris in 1893 still smarted. He determined
to write two articles containing his opinions on art, technique,
painting, life and morality, in order to confound the Parisian critics.
These articles, entitled "Anecdotes of an Apprentice" and "Before

83
and After," are little more than a series of feverishly jotted notes.
Later, with other notes of a similar nature, they were embodied in
a large album entitled "Avant et Après," which remains the fullest
body of information about Gauguin's life and art we possess. The
Mercure de France judged, perhaps rightly, that their tone was too
personally violent and refused to print them.
The other old score that he had to wipe out was with the French
colonial administration. In Tahiti, he had fought the governor, the
law courts, and the gendarmes. Here it was the customs officials
who roused his wrath. Two American ships had recently visited
the island and a certain amount of goods had been sold to the
natives, through the connivance of the gendarmes, without paying
tax. Gauguin immediately wrote a letter on the subject to the
Administration, stating the facts as he understood them and
protesting, on behalf of the natives, against the bribery and
corruption of the Customs in this instance. The only reply made
was a notice from the law courts that the Administration intended
to take steps against him for the dissemination of an untrue
statement. Gauguin appeared in court, where he was promptly
condemned to prison for three months and to a fine of a thousand
francs.
It was ruin, but Gauguin determined to appeal. The tribunal was
irregularly constituted and his facts had been proven to be in part,
at least, true. He was sure of winning his case, but an appeal
necessitated a return to Tahiti and the costs of an attorney, and
his capital was again running low. He wrote to de Montfreid,
begging him to find a buyer for three pictures, at the price of
fifteen hundred francs; he sent off ten more pictures to Vollard.
Then he prepared to make his appeal.
Death surprised him suddenly and Paul Gauguin's appeal will
never be heard in this world.
A letter from the only white man, the Protestant minister Vernier,
who knew him, leaves no doubt on the subject of the cause of
Gauguin's death. It was not the eczema of the legs, nor leprosy,
as some have hinted, nor another dose of arsenic, nor syphilis,
that ended his life; it was a simple syncope of the heart. His
energy, with which he had kept up for so many years the struggle

84
with the world and out of which he had drawn so many beautiful
pictures, was worn out. The machine slackened and stopped.
Paul Gauguin died on the 6th of May, 1903.
A few days before his death he had written his last letter to
Charles Morice, the words of which stir one like a trumpet.
"I am on the ground but I am not beaten. The Indian, who smiles
while he is being tortured, is not conquered. You are mistaken if
you meant that I am wrong in calling myself a savage. I am a
savage, and the civilized feel this, for there is nothing in my work
which could produce bewilderment save this savage strain in me,
for which I am not myself responsible. It is therefore inimitable.
Every human work is a revelation of the individual. Hence there
are two kinds of beauty; one comes from instinct, the other from
labor. The union of the two, with the modifications resulting
therefrom, produces great and very complicated richness. Art-
criticism has yet to discover the fact.... Raphael's great science
does not for a moment prevent me from discovering the instinct of
the beautiful as the essential quality in him. Raphael was born
with beauty. All the rest in him is modification.
"Physics, chemistry, and above all the study of Nature, have
produced an epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said
that artists robbed of all their savagery have wandered into all
kinds of paths in search of the productive element they no longer
possess. They now act only in disorderly groups and are terrified if
they find themselves alone. Solitude is not to be recommended to
every one, for a man must have strength to bear it and to act
alone. All I have learnt from others has been an impediment to
me. It is true I know little, but what I do know is my own."
Yet civilization, after all, had the last word. The very bishop, whom
Gauguin in life had hated and caricatured, intervened when he lay
cold and lifeless and the body of the painter was interred with full
Catholic rites in the cemetery of the Church at Atuana. And, by a
concluding stroke of irony, the grave was left unmarked. Thus one
of the greatest painters of the later nineteenth century, and one of
the bravest men the world has ever seen, mingled his dust with
that of the humblest natives, in the same way as Blake, one of the
greatest painters of the early nineteenth century, had been buried

85
before him in an unmarked grave among the paupers, at Bunhill
Fields.

IV
The immense industrial development which occurred during the
nineteenth century took place so rapidly and universally, that no
one was able to estimate its significance or dispassionately to
weigh its effects. At the outset of the century the vital idea that
pervaded Europe and America was the spiritual idea of liberty and
the rights of man, born in the fires of the French Revolution. After
1848 this idea gradually vanished, and another took its place; the
purely material idea of progress. The perfected application of
steam and the consequent development of machinery; the
immense tapping of the world's resources of coal, metals,
agricultural products; the equally immense, universal exploitation
of human effort necessary to develop these resources to their
maximum; the creation of an international finance, resting upon
vast hoards of wealth in the hands of a limited few, whose world-
wide interests were linked together by railways, steamship lines,
telegraphs, telephones; the ordered regimenting of mankind into a
small capitalist class, invisibly controlling the old, decayed
aristocracy, the official church, the machinery of the law; a larger
middle class, dependent upon and subservient to the capitalists;
and an immense laboring class, exploited in the interests of the
two preceding classes: all these were virtually the creation of a
single century.
Against this overwhelming flood of change, a few exceptionally
gifted men vaguely protested, affirming the greater value of
human life over mechanical invention; maintaining the antique
dignity of man. Their protest was incoherent, individualistic. These
men were like broken and scattered fragments of dykes, still
unsubmerged and striving to hold back the waters of a flood.
Among them must be ranked the artist whose life-story I have
written.

86
All that is vital and valuable in French painting of the nineteenth
century, since Ingres, springs directly from the enthusiasm and
spiritual energy of the French Revolution. The somber fury of
Delacroix, the colossal caricature of Daumier; the peasant art of
Millet; the sane realism of Courbet; the mordant irony of Degas
and Forain; even the feeling for nature and the open air which the
Impressionists gave us, all represent phases of humanity's vague
and enormous hunger for personal freedom, for human liberty and
development. When Gauguin arrived on the scene, the reaction
was already taking place. The official, academic painters were
merely ringing the changes upon a stock of outworn formulas. On
the other hand, the Impressionists were striving to render nature
scientifically, unemotionally. Nature was becoming to them no
longer the mother and nurse of man but a collection of chemical
formulas for soil, air, sunlight. Only Puvis de Chavannes
remained, aloof and misunderstood, painting great decorations
that seemed but the remembrance of some golden age of the
past, and easel pictures of a profound, hopeless pessimism.
Gauguin began to paint, and the protest against science, against
materialism, against unemotional vision began. At the outset he
attempted to follow the scientific formulas of the Impressionists.
But, by the purest instinct he discovered, as Cézanne had already
discovered, that the sensation of light could not be painted, could
only be rendered in color. And he also discovered (this time the
discovery came from Puvis de Chavannes) that the sensation of
form could not be painted either—that out of the variety of shifting
forms offered to us by nature, the artist must select those most
significant to him and that even these must be transposed,
altered, accentuated or suppressed to suit the harmony of the
composition. Thus unconsciously, almost without volition on his
part, he was led to understand that the Primitives everywhere
were the truly great artists, since they expressed great human
emotions about man and nature, without troubling whether their
vision was or was not exact. And so he fought, bitterly, savagely,
for the actual restoration of primitive art and life; for the cause of
natural humanity against the cause of mechanical, dehumanized
efficiency.
Unless we realize this fact, we have not grasped the key, either to
his art or to his life. Gauguin himself admitted that his painting was

87
only a fragmentary indication, an unrealized promise of an
unaccomplished world. And he may have had knowledge also of
the fundamental discord and disorder of his own life, but have
despaired of ever attaining to harmony with himself. At least the
caricature of himself in Contes Barbares is here to remind us that
he was not altogether the spoiled child that some imagine him to
be. Having both the world and himself to struggle against, he at
least determined that his pictorial work should represent the best
part of his personality, even if his life proved only to be, as he said
in his last letter to de Montfreid, "a downfall followed by an attempt
to rise, followed by another downfall." And so in his pictures we
realize the truth of the remark made by Van Gogh after the
disaster that parted them: "Gauguin made one feel that a good
picture should be the equivalent of a good action."
And indeed it is so. Every artist carries upon his shoulders a
profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as
supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern
official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not
the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of
compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a far nobler, far
more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of
life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of
Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his
own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and
death. This duty Gauguin in his art strove to accomplish. He
affirmed his faith in man and in the scene of man's labor, the
earth. Cézanne, perhaps a more accomplished painter, endowed
perhaps with a deeper respect for nature and for the style of the
great painters of the past, shrank from making Gauguin's
affirmation. He accepted in his own life a compromise; in his art he
ruthlessly eliminated the role of the creative and interpretive
imagination. And then, towards the end of his life, Cézanne
complained that Gauguin had vulgarized him.
"Gauguin has not understood me; never will I accept the lack of
gradation and of tone; it's nonsense."
It would have been better for Cézanne to have said that he could
not, dared not understand Gauguin.

88
Nor is this all that Gauguin accomplished. He restored painting to
its proper place in the ordered hierarchy of the arts. He showed us
that its place is between architecture and music, and that
sculpture is its twin sister. He was the first man to suspect that the
progress of the scientific spirit among the Greeks had produced
the same effects in disassociating and destroying the arts, as has
the progress of the scientific spirit in the present day. He believed,
and constantly affirmed, that painting was entering upon a new
musical phase and he built up his pictures on a definite scale of
color harmonies, as well as upon the chosen architectural
proportions of form, which, whether given by perspective or not,
seemed to him necessary. Thus he reconciled the Venetians and
the Primitives, and showed that the goal of both form and color is
decoration.
William Blake might perhaps have admired this rude artisan, who
painted his dream of a golden age in his own way, who steadfastly
strove to grasp the essential truth in every tradition: Egyptian,
Cambodian, Persian, Chinese, Gothic, Greek and Renaissance.
But Gauguin could never, had he known of Blake, have pardoned
in him the ultimate ascetic negation, the contemptuous denial of
earthliness, of "the delusions of the goddess Nature." In Gauguin,
the spirit never conquered the flesh, and he remained to the end,
a man. Blake was possibly the greater visionary: Gauguin is
certainly the better stone on which to build.

V
After Gauguin's death, his art rapidly became almost forgotten in
France. He remarked himself towards the end of his life that there
were not fifty of his pictures in that country. Even the few there
are, hang in scattered private collections, each containing one or
at most three or four. The great bulk of his work is in Germany,
Scandinavia and Russia. It proved impossible even in 1911 to
raise sufficient money to buy L'Esprit Veille for the Louvre.
It is greatly to be regretted that no museum or collection has been
able to assemble a considerable quantity of his work. Gauguin

89
was, above all things, a decorator, and half a dozen of his pictures
make a greater effect than one. One does not judge Puvis de
Chavannes, another decorator, solely by his easel pictures, but by
the great decorative schemes in Paris, at Amiens and in Boston.
This remark applies equally to other decorators, such as Raphael,
Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Veronese. A room hung with twenty
Gauguins would produce an immense effect of monumental
power. That such a room exists in Moscow can be small
consolation to Western Europeans at present.
His pupils and followers either plodded along unimaginatively, like
Sérusier, or drifted off into academicism, like Bernard, or watered
down their technique into the tasteless picture-book and stage-
costume decoration of Maurice Denis. None of them seized
Gauguin's secret of remaining simple, direct and savage. Aristide
Maillol is an honorable exception. A sculptor and tapestry
designer, he was able to work upon the indications that Gauguin
had left for the guidance of these branches and to show us, in part
at least, how they might be realized.
The main stream of French art simply ignored Gauguin. Instead of
making with him a bold leap backwards to the origins of all
tradition, it went forward to even more scientific and unemotional
essays in painting. The Neo-Impressionists with their spots of
complementary colors were followed by disciples of Cézanne,
who sought to reduce all forms to certain geometrical primaries,
basing their doctrine on certain words which the master of Aix had
let fall concerning the simplification of form. Out of these emerged
Matisse, whose art became, through a more and more ruthless
elimination of modeling, through a more and more arbitrary
placing of colors, an abstraction, an utterly unemotional series of
hieroglyphs. Then Picasso came upon the scene, eliminated color
altogether and began to paint the abstract geometry of form. The
Cubists followed Picasso. The Futurists in their turn started
another kind of abstract painting, the painting of mechanical
energy, the dynamism latent in form.
The Expressionists, meanwhile, held to Van Gogh's and
Gauguin's idea that the picture must represent some emotion, but
they denied Gauguin's corollary that some form derived from
nature was necessary to transpose this emotion into its pictorial

90
equivalent. Consequently they eliminated form and strove to paint
abstract emotion. Finally, the Vorticists combined Futurism and
Expressionism into a single whole and painted the abstraction of
an abstraction—the emotion of dynamic energy, thus declaring
painting to be an absolute-thing-in-itself, an art utterly innocent of
any illustrative purpose whatsoever.
The motives of all these confused art movements, perplexing and
apparently in-congruous, were identical. They were all actuated by
a mania for scientific discovery, a desire to analyze phenomena
until the reality behind phenomena could be found. The physicists,
chemists, philosophers had proven that the world of appearances
was not the real world—that everything that existed was merely a
question of ions and electrons, of radiant or non-radiant energy, or
perhaps of elasticity and inelasticity. These young art
revolutionaries, who gave themselves so many queer labels, were
not, as many supposed, either insincere or insane. They were
merely smitten with the desire to make painting—and not only
painting, but even other arts as well—a branch of abstract
science. The world of phenomena had been proved to be an
illusion, making some abstract concept. Therefore they strove to
paint, not what seemed to them unreal, but their absolute
conceptions. This new metaphysic, this new attempt at absolute
realism, this final development of scholastic art-dogma, as narrow
and soul-destroying in its way as the rules for painting religious
ikons, evolved and practiced for centuries by the Byzantine monks
of Mount Athos, was rapidly conquering the whole field of aft when
the past war broke out. Nor has the war altogether suppressed its
manifestations.
The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the
past war has been altogether out of proportion to the military
results achieved by either side. However true it may be to hold the
Germans as primarily responsible for this destruction, in the first
instance, yet it remains true that none of the contending forces
can escape responsibility for the later developments of the
struggle. Apart from Germany's undeniable guilt in starting the
war, civilization as a whole must answer for the horror of its
method. A piece of heavy artillery is equally destructive, whether it
be cast at Essen or at Le Creusot; a Caproni aeroplane can carry
as many bombs as a Gotha; the submarine was first employed in

91
war by the Americans; the machine gun is an English invention.
For all these devices of destruction we of the twentieth century,
with our belief in purely material progress, stand guilty to-day; and
the blood of our guilt has reddened earth already for over four
years and may continue to do so for many generations to come.
The past war before it came to an end had long ceased to be a
contest between national ideals and had become a struggle
between man and an inhuman, scientific, organized machine. And
the machine was victorious. Just as the scientific spirit,
conquering art before the war, led to the extravagances of Cubism
and Vorticism so, since the war, it has attacked life itself; and
made of national existence, no longer a problem of human
bravery, resource and intelligence, but merely a problem of
relative man-power and munitions. We have learned to speak of
"man-power" as our books on physics speak of "horse-power."
The task we, in the war, set ourselves was a grisly paradox; we
proposed to save civilization, to undo a great wrong, by destroying
the very basis of human life on which all civilization stands.
It is therefore with a sense of liberation that we now turn back to a
few artists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
foresaw that material progress would end in annihilating humanity,
that nature and humanity, hand in hand, are more sacred than all
the shells that could ever be produced, the guns that could ever
be mounted or the laws that could ever be written. With a sense of
spiritual release we revert to those who dreamed of the great
return to nature—to Rousseau, Whitman, Gauguin, as well as to
others who, although perhaps lesser men than they, followed in
their path—David Thoreau, Richard Jefferies. They were the
prophets of the new gospel that must some day prevail—the
gospel that will set humanity above material progress and nature
above æsthetic negation. Their vision was of something not in
themselves but of something higher and nobler, as Gauguin knew
when he deliberately caricatured himself in Contes Barbares. As
he knew also, the vision was of something stated only
fragmentarily, inscribed as a promise, a foretaste, an indication of
what might be. In Rousseau's prose, in Whitman's poetry and in
Gauguin's painting we see the only gleam of hope for self-tortured
humanity, and the promise of a land where nature and man are
one and where reigns a peace that passes all understanding.

92
93
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED
WORKS OF BIOGRAPHY:
1. Paul Gauguin par Jean de Rotonchamp, Imprimé à Weimar par
les Soins du Comte de Kessler et se Trouve à Paris, chez
Edouard Druet, Rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré, No. 114. 1906.
Edition limited to 250 copies.
2. Gauguin, by Charles Morice. Floury, Paris, 1919. This and the
preceding work are the standard sources of Gauguin's life.
3. Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Charles Daniel de Monfreid. Paris,
Cres, 1919.
4. White Shadows in the South Seas, by Frederick O'Brien. New
York, The Century Co., 1920. A travel book, with a few new
sidelights on Gauguin's final period.
5. Avant et Après. Paul Gauguin aux Marquises. 1903. 100 copies
only published in photo-reproduction from the original manuscript.
A translation into German has also appeared. Kurt Wolf Verlag,
Berlin, 1920.
WORKS OF ART CRITICISM IN ENGLISH:
1. Modern Painting, by Willard Huntingdon Wright. New York, The
John Lane Company.

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Life and Art, by
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107
Table of Contents
PAUL GAUGUIN 1
His Life and Art BY 1
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER 2
WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS 2
TO M.T.H.S. WHO HELPED ME WITH ADVICE AND
3
CRITICISM
PAUL GAUGUIN 5
PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885 5
PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-
21
1889
PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891 37
PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895 59
PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 1895-1903 76
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED 94

108