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On 8 May 1903, having lost a futile and fatally exhausting battle with colonial officials, threatened with a ruinous fine and an imprisonment for allegedly instigating the natives to mutiny and slandering the authorities, after a week of acute physical sufferings endured in utter isolation, an artist who had devoted himself to glorifying the pristine harmony of Oceania’s tropical nature and its people died.

Garden at Vaugirard

c. 1881

Oil on canvas, 87 × 114 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

There is bitter irony in the name given by Gauguin to his house at Atuona – “Maison du Jouir” (House of Pleasure) – and in the words carved on its wood reliefs, Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (Be in love and you will be happy) and Soyez mystérieuses (Be mysterious).

Flower Vase by the Window

1881

Oil on canvas, 19 × 27 cm

Fine Arts Museum, Rennes

In his regular report to Paris, the bishop wrote: “The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist but an enemy of God and everything that is decent.” It was only twenty years later that the artist’s name appeared on his tombstone, and even that belated honour was due to a curious circumstance: Gauguin’s grave was found by a painter belonging to the Society of American Fakirs.

Snow Effects (Snow in Rue Carcel)

1882–1883

Oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

It was only due to the presence of a few travellers and colonists who knew something about art and to the ill-concealed greediness of his recent enemies who, for all their hate, did not shy away from making money on his works, that part of Gauguin’s artistic legacy escaped destruction.

Sleeping Child

1884

Oil on canvas, 46 × 55.5 cm

Private collection, Lausanne

For example, the policeman of Atuona who had personally supervised the sale, destroyed with his own hands some of the artist’s works, which supposedly offended his chaste morals, was not above purloining a few pictures and later upon his return to Europe, opened a kind of Gauguin museum. As the result of all this, not one of Gauguin’s works remains in Tahiti.

Ice Skaters in the Frederiksberg Park

1884

Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

The news of Gauguin’s death, which reached France with a four-month delay, evoked an unprecedented interest in his life and work. The artist’s words about posthumous fame came true. He shared the fate of many artists who received recognition when they could no longer enjoy it.

Dieppe Beach

1885

Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm

National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Daniel de Monfreid predicted this in a letter written to Gauguin several months before his death: “In returning you will risk damaging that process of incubation which is taking place in the public’s appreciation of you. You are now that unprecedented legendary artist, who from the furthest South Seas sends his disturbing, inimitable works, the definitive works of a great man who has, as it were, disappeared from the world. Your enemies – and like all who upset the mediocrity you have many enemies – are silent: they dare not attack you, do not even think of it. You are so far away. You should not return. You should not deprive them of the bone they hold in their teeth. You are already unassailable like all the great dead; you already belong to the history of art.”

Bathers in Dieppe

1885

Oil on canvas, 71.5 × 71.5 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen

Corner of a Pond

1885

Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm

Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan

In the same year, 1903, Ambroise Vollard exhibited at his Paris gallery about a hundred paintings and drawings by Gauguin. Some had been sent to him by the artist from Oceania, others had been purchased from various art dealers and collectors. In 1906, in Paris, a Gauguin retrospective was held at the newly opened Salon d’Automne.

Self-Portrait in front of Easel

1885

Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm

Private collection

Two hundred and twenty-seven works (not counting those listed in the catalogue without numbers) were put on display – paintings, graphic art, pottery and woodcarvings. Octave Maus, the leading Belgian art critic, wrote on this occasion: “Paul Gauguin is a great colourist, a great draughtsman, a great decorator; a versatile and self-confident painter.”

Self-Portrait “To My Friend Carrière”

1886

Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 32.5 cm

National Gallery of Art, Washington

When it comes to the question of accepting or rejecting his artistic credo or of determining his place in art, the different, even mutually exclusive views expressed by different generations of researchers with different aesthetic tastes are quite justified. Some experts see Gauguin as a destroyer of realism who denounced traditions and paved the way for “free art”, be it Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism or Abstraction.

Self-Portrait near Golgotha

1886

Oil on canvas, 74 × 64 cm

Museu de Arte, São Paulo

Others, on the contrary, think that Gauguin continued the European artistic tradition. Some contemporaries reacted to his departure from Europe with mistrust and suspicion, for they believed that a true artist could and must work only on his native soil and not derive inspiration from an alien culture. Pissarro, Cézanne and Renoir shared this opinion, for example. They considered Gauguin’s borrowings from the stylistics of Polynesian culture to be a kind of plunder.

Young Bretons at Bath

1886

Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm

Museum of Art, Hiroshima

Such controversial opinions of Gauguin’s art are by no means accidental. His life and work present many contradictions, though often only outward ones. His life was naturally integrated with his creative activity, while the latter in its turn embodied his ideals and views on life. But this organic unity of life and work was maintained through a never-ending dramatic struggle.

The Four Breton Girls

1886

Oil on canvas, 72 × 91 cm

Neue Pinakothek, Munich

It was the struggle for the right to become an artist, the struggle for existence, the struggle against public opinion, against his family and friends who failed to understand him, and finally, it was his inner struggle for the preservation of his identity, his own creative and human self. Gauguin could hardly have become an artist who “reinvented painting” (Maurice Malingue) and who “initiated the art of modern times” (René Huyghe).

Seated Breton

1886

Charcoal and pastel, 32.8 × 48 cm

Art Institute, Chicago

Gauguin began his career as a grown man. Nothing in his childhood or youth betrayed any hint of his future as an artist. He was born in Paris on 7 June 1848, in the midst of the revolutionary events when barricade fighting was going on in the streets of the city. This fact was to have repercussions for Gauguin’s later life.

Young Breton Seated

1886

Charcoal and watercolour, 30.5 × 42.2 cm

Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, Paris

It is difficult to say whether Clovis Gauguin played an active role in the events, but it is a fact that following the failure of Marrast (who was a member of General Cavaignac’s government) in the election to the National Assembly, the Gauguins left France. In the autumn of 1849, the family sailed for Peru, where they could count on the support of Mine Gauguin’s distant but influential relatives.

The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Fighting with the Angel)

1888

73 × 92 cm

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

On 30 October 1849, he died at sea and his wife, with two children, had to continue the journey on her own. Childhood in Peru was forever engraved on Paul Gauguin’s memory. The recollections of simple, natural relations among people with different-coloured skins, who lacked racial or social prejudice, the relations, which might have been largely idealised in the child’s memory, merged with the recollections of luxuriant tropical nature with its rich colours under the dazzling sun.

Blue Trees

1888

Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm

Ordrupgaardsamlingen, Copenhagen

It is very likely that these early impressions determined the subsequent development of Gauguin’s artistic tastes and ideals. His return to France put an end to Paul’s happy and carefree life. At school in Orleans and later at a Lycée in Paris the dream of tropical countries and the sea never left Gauguin.

Bretons and Calf

1888

Oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

At fifteen he found employment as a cabin-boy on a merchant ship and sailed to the South American coast, almost retracing the route of his first voyage overseas. But this romantic start was followed by an abrupt and unwelcome change: the Franco-Prussian war broke out, the merchant ship on which Gauguin served was requisitioned, and instead of the tropics he found himself in the north, near the Norwegian and Danish coasts.