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THE
LIFE AND TIMES OF PAUL GAUGUIN
Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. His father
Clovis was a radical journalist, and there was radical blood on his mother's
side too - Aline was the daughter of the Peruvian-born feminist and socialist
Flora Tristan. But the year of Paul's birth was a bad time for radicals.
By November 1848, Louis Napoleon had seized power in France, and his political
opponents had a tendency to disappear. Clovis decided to visit his wife's
relatives, and the family sailed to Peru in 1849.
Clovis died of a heart attack on the journey from France, but Aline, with
Paul and his sister Marie, spent the next six years in Lima under the protection
of her great-uncle. Then Paul's grandfather died in France, and the family
returned to take up their inheritance in the old man's home town of Orleans.
Dull, provincial and thoroughly bourgeois, Orleans was a depressing contrast
to colorful, subtropical Peru, and Paul hated it. When he was 17, he did
what thousands of restless, adventurous young men had done before him:
he went to sea. He worked for three years on a merchant vessel, and when
he became due for military service in 1868, he chose to serve his stint
in the navy.
Paul was released from the service in 1871, and it seemed he had got the
taste for adventure out of his system. He was 23, and it was time for him,
as a young man of respectable family, to settle down. His mother had died
while he was still at sea, but had previously arranged for the wealthy
banker Gustave Arosa to be Paul's guardian. Arosa was happy to use his
contacts to find him a post with a leading Paris stockbroker.
A BUSINESS CAREER
Gauguin's clerkship was a comfortable, well-paid job, and
it gave him plenty of opportunity for lucrative speculation on the stock
exchange. An affluent middle-class future seemed assured. In 1873 he married
a Danish girl, Mette Sophie Gad, and they progressed from a fine apartment
in town to an even finer suburban house, as Mette regularly produced the
next generation of Gauguins. By 1883, he had money, a business reputation,
a good home and five children.
But Gauguin had developed a hobby - he liked to paint.
His interest in art was encouraged by his guardian, who had a fine collection
of paintings and in whose house most of the best known painters of the
day appeared from time to time. Gauguin was encouraged also by Arosa's
daughter, an amateur painter, and in 1874 he had some lessons with the
Impressionist Camille Pissarro. But essentially he was self-taught.
At Arosa's house and elsewhere, Gauguin had met the leading
Impressionist painters and even started to buy their work. He began to
align himself with them, exhibiting in their group shows from 1879 onward.
His paintings came in for a fair amount of praise, and they sold quite
well. Guaguin must have toyed for some time with the idea of turning professional,
but in 1882 his mind was made up for him by a stock market crash. Guaguin's
"secure" job suddenly looked anything but secure. In 1883, confident of
his ability to keep his family by painting, he resigned.
Unfortunately, the general climate of bankruptcy and
despondency had much the same effect on the art market as on the stock
market. By 1884, Guaguin's savings had run out, he had sold scarcely a
painting and although a move from Paris to Rouen in Normandy had reduced
his household expenses, his family was fast approaching destitution. Mette
now took a hand. Her husband had had a year as a painter and failed; now
she insisted the family move to her native Denmark.
DESERTING THE FAMILY
But the move was not a success. Although Guaguin found a
job as a sales representative for a manufacturer of tarpaulins, he sold
no more of his company's goods than he did of his paintings. Besides, his
commitment to his art was now becoming total. Gauguin returned to painting
and in 1885 left once more for Paris, leaving Mette with four children
in Copenhagen. He took six-year-old Clovis with him.
The following year was perhaps the worst in Gauguin's
life. By the winter of 1885-6, he was penniless, and he and his son were
reduced to living in one miserable room. Cold and undernourished, the boy
contracted smallpox; to feed him, Gauguin managed to find work as a bill-poster
for a railway company. Remarkably, Clovis recovered, but it was the last
time Gauguin did anything for his family. From now on, their fate was in
Mette's hands.
In June Gauguin moved once more, to Pont-Aven in Brittany,
where he found not only cheap lodging but the company of appreciative fellow
artists. But there was no financial success to match his growing confidence.
Returning to Paris at the end of 1886, he almost starved during the winter.
The following year, he decided to make a complete break. "Paris", he wrote,
"is a desert for a poor man. I must get my energy back, and I'm going to
Panama to live like a native."
Somehow he scraped together the fare, but "living like
a native" in Panama turned out to mean laboring with pick and shovel in
the abortive canal project then underway. After a few weeks, sick with
fever, he gave up on Panama and ventured to Martinique in the French West
Indies. Four months later, ill health and poverty forced him back to France,
and he returned to Brittany.
A VISIT TO VAN GOGH
Creatively, this was a vital period. At the age of 40, he
was finding himself at last as a great and original painter. But the Brittany
winters depressed him. In October 1888, he accepted an invitation from
Vincent van Gogh, whom he had met two years earlier in Paris, to pass the
winter with him at Arles, in the South of France. But Gauguin had been
there only two months when Van Gogh went famously insane, and threatened
him with a razor. There was nothing to do but return to Paris.
Over the next few years, Gauguin alternated between Paris
and Brittany, producing some of his best work. His reputation among his
contemporaries had never been higher, but he was still desperately short
of money, and he had never lost his yearning to return to the tropics.
Finally he settled on another French colony - Tahiti - and on 1 April 1891,
he sailed from Marseilles.
At first, Tahiti was not what he had hoped for. He got
a friendly reception from the Governor, and an audience was arranged for
him with the last native king, Pomare V, who Gauguin hoped would prove
a source of commissions. But Pomare died suddenly - of drink - a few hours
before the audience. Soon Gauguin was disgusted with the capital of Papeete.
"It was Europe all over again", he wrote, "just what I thought I had broken
away from - made still worse by colonial snobbery."
In the country district of Mataiea, however, Gauguin
found the peace he wanted - and a young Tahitian girl to share his hut.
Even in paradise, though, the need for money reared its ugly head. Despite
his dreams, Gauguin could not live for free. He lacked the skills to fish
or to farm, and in a community of self-sufficient families there was no
real possibility of buying food. He had to rely on expensive - and incongruous
- European canned and dried produce, bought in Papeete. A spell of ill
health made further inroads into his savings, and in 1893 he had to apply
to the Governor to have himself repatriated to France.
RETURN TO TAHITI
It was a humiliating return, but the canvases that
Gauguin brought back with him persuaded a leading Paris gallery owner to
give him an exhibition. Though sales were poor, Gauguin found himself the
center of the art world's interest. And he had a financial windfall: an
uncle back in Orleans died and left him enough money to set up his own
studio in Montparnasse. But he was determined to return to Tahiti, and
left France for the last time in July 1895.
The eight years that remained to him were great ones
for his art, but Gauguin's life was often miserable. Most of the time he
was desperately short of money and could rarely afford the stays in hospital
that his worsening health - due to syphilis - demanded. In 1897, he even
attempted suicide. The following year, he contemplated abandoning painting,
and had to take a miserable job as a draughtsman to pay off at least some
of his debts.
Disgusted by colonial society and its effects on the
Tahitians, Guaguin took to writing vitriolic articles for a local newspaper.
In 1901, he abandoned the island altogether and made the 800 mile journey
to the Marquesas Islands, where he settled in the village of Atuona. There,
he built his last dwelling, "The House of Pleasure", as he called it. Money
at last was coming in from Paris, and Gauguin was working happily as well
as hard. But he was still making enemies. His attacks on the colonial administration
continued and he waged a continuous war with the Catholic Church.
In 1903, the authorities took their revenge. Gauguin
was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for "defamation". He never
served the sentence. On 8 May 1903, aged 54, he died while awaiting the
result of an appeal. The local bishop wrote an uncharitable epitaph. "The
only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible
individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist, but an enemy of God". Posterity
had a different verdict.
GAUGUIN GALLERY
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