Did Gauguin inspire 1920s visitors to Tahiti?

Robert Keable lived in Paul Gauguin’s house in Tahiti for a year in 1923 twenty-five years after Gauguin had left the island for the last time. But who was Gauguin and how famous was he by 1923? Two recent excellent books, Wild Thing, A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux and Gauguin and Polynesia by Nicholas Thomas, have shed more light on the life of Gauguin. I am currently preparing a talk on American and British writers and artists who travelled to Tahiti in the 1920s, and looking at who, and what, influenced them to choose that particular island out of all the many islands in the South Seas. Today there is some talk about whether Gauguin should be celebrated; - the excellent podcast The Gauguin Dilemma hosted by Sosefina Fuamoli for the National Gallery of Australia examines this issue.

Gauguin today

Paul Gauguin, the French painter and sculptor, arrived in Tahiti in1891. It can certainly be argued that no one else played such a major role in creating an enduring vision of Tahiti on the world's imagination as did Gauguin. Today I cannot think of any painter whose work and the place he painted are so closely entwined. Google ‘Tahiti Painter Images’ and all the images, certainly on the first page, are by Gauguin. Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings stand out in any art gallery. And tourists to the island are constantly reminded of the link between Gauguin and Tahiti. Sosefina Fuamoli exemplified this by quoting from the website for Paul Gauguin Cruises:

At the turn of the century, Impressionist Paul Gauguin travelled to the tropical shores of French Polynesia to create some of his most renowned masterpieces. Today, his namesake, the 330-guest M S Paul Gauguin, transports discerning guests to the same romantic Tahitian vacation Paradise to explore, enrich and escape.[i] 

Images of his paintings can be found all over the world. In Tahiti nearly every house has a Gauguin image on the wall and there are images of his paintings on lighters, t shirts, mugs and beach towels.[ii] Ironically although Gauguin spent almost 8 years in Tahiti from 1891 to 1901 there are no actual paintings or sculptures of his still on the island. His work was not appreciated by the people on the island at the time, nor by many back in France, but that changed pretty quickly after his death.

Gauguin before Tahiti

Paul Gauguin was born into a wealthy family in France in 1848 and, although he was a weekend painter as a young man, he went into business and set himself up as a successful stockbroker and art dealer.  He met Mette-Sophie Gad, a Dane who was visiting Paris in 1873 and they were soon married. She was 23, two years younger than him. They lived a very secure, happy, middle-class life in Paris and had five children born between 1874 and 1883.  Their comfortable life changed when they lost most of their money in the stock market crash of 1882 which led to a contraction in the art market and a drying up of his income. He decided to try his luck as a full-time painter and first moved the family to Rouen before following Mette to Denmark where he tried selling French tarpaulins. This enterprise was a failure and eventually he left his wife and four of this five children and, aged 36, returned to Paris. For six years he painted, developing his craft and spending time with other artists.

We only know of one mistress from his time in Paris, Juliette Huet. When he discovered she was pregnant he paid the first few month’s rent for a flat for her, bought her a sewing machine and left. Over the next few years, he travelled both around France and abroad. He worked first in Brittany then travelled to Panama and Martinique. On his return he befriended Theo and Vincent van Gogh and spent a fractious few weeks with Vincent down in Arles. 

Gauguin was keen to go abroad again, he said to escape European civilisation, and he spent many days at the Exposition Universelle in Paris looking for inspiration. This Exposition, which ran from May to October 1889, became famous for the unveiling of the Eiffle Tower. It was a grand affair with over 60,000 exhibitors, showcasing international art and technology, with almost half from outside of France. One display was from Tahiti, which had become part of the Établissements de l'Océanie (Establishments in Oceania) only nine years before. The French had bought some Tahitians over to Paris hoping they would pose in a traditional hut at the exhibition in their traditional dress. The Tahitians refused, insisting on wearing European dress, so the final display featured:

Just three traditional oval huts disappointingly short of bare-breasted maidens, or indeed inhabitants of any kind. Its principal exhibits were a collection of palm-frond hats, and a skull improbably described as a drinking vessel. … Empty walls … were filled by photographs by Charles Spitz …gorgeously composed pictures of the palm-fringed island with its bare-breasted young women and bare-chested men.[iii]

Despite the unexciting display Gauguin’s interest was piqued and he wrote to a friend describing his desire to ‘buy a hut of the kind you saw at the Universal Exhibition... this would cost almost nothing’[iv]. At the time Gauguin was thinking about trying to set up a tropical studio where he and like-minded artists could pursue their craft away from western prejudices

Tahiti wasn’t Gauguin’s first choice. We know this as he applied to go to the French protectorate of Tonkin in Vietnam, writing to both Ministry of the Marine and the French Emigration Society who could both pay for the journey and provide a job for useful emigrants. After being turned down he set his sights on Madagascar.

However, a friend of his, Emile Bernard, suggested Tahiti and sent him the government handbook for emigrants. Included in the booklet was the claim that in Tahiti:

toil is a thing unknown. The forests produce spontaneously everything necessary for the nourishment of those carefree tribes; the fruit of the breadtree and bananas grow for everybody and suffice for all. The years slip by for Tahitians in utter idleness and perpetual dreams … Hospitality is offered, warmly and without charge, everywhere…

Furthermore, Tahitian women were described as looking ‘so sweet and innocently voluptuous that it is impossible not to share in the general admiration which she arouses’. The leaflet concluded ‘the lucky inhabitants of the remote South Sea paradise of Tahiti know life only at its brightest.’[v] The promotional leaflets even carried extracts from le Mariage de Loti. Once Gauguin decided to go to Tahiti, he financed the trip with the sale of some of his paintings and via some fund-raising events including a benefit concert and a banquet.

Gauguin in Tahiti

He was 43 years old when he set off, travelling third class to Tahiti aboard the postal steamer, L'Océanien. The journey took 63 days to get there, calling in at every French colony on route. He arrived with a letter from the director of the Beaux Arts promising to purchase a picture of his for 3,000 Francs on his return. The French authorities were not impressed with him, although the Governor did give him temporary accommodation for a few days, so they were relieved when he moved out of the capital. He hoped initially to make money from portraiture. He was commissioned to paint Suzanne Bambridge, a member of one of the most prominent families on the island. The unflattering painting was Gauguin’s first and last commission on the island.

A few months later Gauguin went travelling around the island to look for a wife and met a woman who offered him her daughter, Teha’mana. A deal was struck. A contract signed. No money exchanged hands. Teha’mana agreed to go with him. He agreed to send her home after an 8-day ‘trial’. Which he did. But she returned to live with him. She was thirteen. In his book Noa, Noa Gauguin proclaims his love for her – calling her Téhura. But as Prideaux points out she ‘was doubly a victim: trafficked by her family for an advantageous connection, and victim to the lust of the much older European man’. The law was probably on Gauguin’s side - the age of consent in France and French territories was 13 - but Gauguin was already married.

After two years Gauguin returned to France, leaving behind Teha’mana, pregnant with his child. He hoped to sell his paintings, but his one big exhibition was a financial failure as he only sold 11 paintings including two bought by his friend Edgar Degas. However, his uncle Zizi had died leaving him and his sister 11,000 francs each, a sizeable sum – about £180,000 today - for someone who looked after their money. Gauguin did not. He partied in Paris running a Thursday night Salon called the Studio of the South Seas and began a non-exclusive affair with Annah, a young black model then perhaps 15. Non-exclusivity meant he could start seeing Juliette again who did visit him, with and without, their daughter Germaine, until she found Annah at his house and broke off with him forever.

After two eventful years back in France he had fallen out with his agent and finally split from his wife, but he still had enough money to return to Tahiti in 1895 and rented a house in Punaauia, about 12 miles from the capital. Teha’mana had married and although she visited him, perhaps to explain that she had lost their child (we do not know whether through miscarriage or abortion), she returned to her husband. So, he was offered another girl by a neighbour. She was Pahura. 14-and-a-half when she moved into his house. He boasted in a letter ‘I have a fifteen-year-old wife who cooks my grub and gives me a great blow job, whenever I want, all for the reward of a frock, worth ten francs, a month.’[vi]

He painted several nudes of Pahura including some of her pregnant. Tragically their daughter died a few days after her birth. After a while he started to have financial difficulties not helped by taking out a large loan to buy a plot of land on which he built his house and a studio. He was unsuccessful in finding investors in his work back in France, but he managed to get some work on the island teaching art, working as a draughtsman in the Department of Colonial Works and writing for the opposition newspaper. In 1899 he had a second child with Pahura – Emile – although her family refused to allow Gauguin to be registered as the father. His health at this time was not good and his financial problems worsened so eventually he was forced to sell his house and to leave for the Marquesas, without Pahura who declined the invitation.

In the Marquesas he set himself up in a new house, the Maison du Jouir, (House of Enjoyment) where local young women would model for him, party the evening away and take it in turns to stay the night. After a month and a half, he decided to start working properly, end the studio parties and find a girl to come and live with him. He found Vaeoho Marie-Rose, fourteen, whose father allowed her to live with Gauguin in exchange for thirty-one metres of cotton fabric and a 200-franc sewing machine. She too had his baby. He painted her but his main model was Tohotaua, the married daughter of his cook, whose husband later said he didn’t mind that she had sex with Gauguin.

He died a year after he arrived in the Marquesas. The suggestion for many years was that he died of syphilis despite the doctor on the island diagnosing ‘eczema complicated by erysipelas’ – a bacterial skin infection. Remarkably, as Prideaux explains in her wonderful biography of Gauguin, his teeth were examined almost 100 years after his death, and it was confirmed that he had not had syphilis.[vii] The other common misapprehension was that he died of leprosy but, as we will see, we have Somerset Maugham to blame for that.

Gauguin the monster

There seems no doubt to me that Gauguin was a monster, his behaviour an abomination. There have been two recent excellent books by Sue Prideaux[viii]  and Nicholas Thomas[ix] which have looked back on his life in Tahiti, and the more I have read the clearer it seems that Gauguin lived - certainly for his last twenty years - a selfish, immoral life, trying to disguise himself as a noble savage. He was too clever, too educated, too middle class not to know that his behaviour was evil. If he was alive today and acting now as he did then, I believe he would be seen as another Gary Glitter or Jeffrey Epstein. He would be on the run or in prison. His paintings would be removed from all art galleries. We now know that Gauguin helped campaign against the colonial rule of the French, often putting the case on behalf of the local people through letters and newspaper articles. He acquired a reputation especially in the Marquesas as a people’s champion. Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein followed the same playbook.

Elizabeth Childs explained why at the turn of the twentieth century people might not have been shocked by Gauguin’s behaviour. For a start Mette never asked for a divorce perhaps because:

 

A spouse leaving a wife and kids behind to go off and pursue a professional goal was a very common 19th century working class practice. … It was a structure that was deeply common among those who weren't wealthy and were often, … for better or worse, going off to the colonies to make their way.

 

And Childs points out:

his first partner in Tahiti, Teha'amana, was 13. Now that's shocking to contemporary ears, but there's several contexts for that, which include that in France, 13 was the age of sexual consent in the Islands it was also an age at which commonly young people left their families and lived in partnerships, kind of trial marriages for a while. This was common among the teenagers of the time he was in Tahiti. And there's also the reality that women themselves often chose to marry very – what we consider to be – very young today. And a really good example of that is the Queen of Tahiti Queen Marau, she married at the age of 15 and she was the Queen! … To some extent, these young girls were supported in their partnerships with visiting colonial men because they offered opportunities, opportunities for securing wealth and partnership.[x]

Robert Keable, writing in 1923 was certainly fooled. He wrote:

From 1895 to 1901… Gauguin sought consistently to live closely and wholeheartedly in touch with the primitive that he might interpret its spirit and wrest its secret. In him there burned a genius which sought that expression and needed that milieu. It was the fourth and final revolt which took him to the Marquesas in one last desperate attempt to escape from the growing civilisation of Tahiti and its narrow-minded, misunderstanding, intolerant, bourgeois officialdom;[xi]

I appreciate Gauguin claimed he wanted to live in the old Tahiti, the one untouched by civilisation. He wrote that he wanted the chance to ‘go far away from the European centre’ and a to adopt the natives’ life outright, living among them in the bush. Many others were looking to escape Western influences. But the truth about Gauguin as Caroline Vercoe pointed out was that he was ‘part of an ongoing practice of Western men going into non-Western places and exploiting young people.’[xii] There are still men today who want to live like Gauguin, exploiting young girls or boys. And as we have seen it did not start with Gauguin. For the English and Americans bought back by Wallis and Cook and for the French it was Bougainville writing about these 'sexually available beautiful women' which Gauguin surely read.[xiii]

Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh wrote the poem Guys Like Gauguin. The first verse:

 

thanks, Bougainville

for desiring ‘em young

so guys like Gauguin could dream

and dream,

then take his syphilitic body

downstream to the tropics

to test his artistic hypothesis

about how the uncivilised

ripen like pawpaw

are best slightly raw

delectably thin

dangling like golden prepubescent buds

seeding nymphomania

for guys like Gauguin.

And Pierre Loti could easily have been added to the poem as we know Gauguin read Loti's Le Mariage de Loti before he first travelled out to the south pacific.

Gauguin’s fame

You may have guessed that I have very little time for Gauguin and his behaviour. But this was not how he made his name. His fame comes from his extraordinary paintings and sculptures and from his important contribution to the history of art.

Art historian Cindy King wrote that Gauguin’s

self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin cultivated and inhabited a dual image of himself as, on the one hand, a wolfish wild man and on the other, a sensitive martyr for art. His notoriety helped to promote his astonishing work, which freed color from mimetic representation and distorted form for expressive purposes. Gauguin pioneered the Symbolist art movement in France and set the stage for Fauvism and Expressionism.[xiv]

Gauguin was a very important and influential painter. It seems extraordinary to think that two of the greatest modern painters Vincent van Gogh and Gauguin lived and painted together for two months in Arles, both later accepted as geniuses, but at the time struggling painters. Gauguin was more successful than Van Gogh during his lifetime, and he did sell many of the paintings that he sent back to France from Tahiti. Indeed, it was the promise of regular income in return for a steady stream of new work which helped finance his move to the Marquesas Islands. Today any scrap of Gauguin’s work – carvings, ceramics or paintings would be worth a fortune but that was not the case when he left Tahiti. The man who bought the land from Gauguin burnt a cartload of carvings and as Keable wrote ‘God knows what else.’

Today Gauguin is a very famous artist. His 1892 Tahitian painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo, or When Will You Marry? is one of the ten most expensive paintings ever sold at auction (£210m). In 2010 Nevermore painted in 1897 was voted Britain’s most romantic work of art. Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings hang in art galleries around the world including London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Helsinki, Oslo, Zurich, Madrid, Jerusalem, Moscow, St Petersburg, New York, Chicago, Washington, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, the list goes on. All over the world in fact, although sadly there are no originals left in Tahiti or the Marquesas. 

But how famous and popular were Gauguin’s works in the early years after his death?

During his lifetime Gauguin’s paintings did sell but for relatively low prices. His work had supporters, Edgar Degas being perhaps the most famous, and many young artists in Paris looked up to him. But equally many critics and art collectors disliked the paintings. The Director of Beaux Arts in Paris, M Rougon, considered Gauguin’s work ‘repulsive’ and promised ‘never will the French Government spend one franc in the purchase of that savage’s pictures!’[xv]

Towards the end of his life there is evidence that his art dealer Ambroise Vollard stockpiled Gauguin’s paintings buying many himself so that he could sell them on later. Certainly, the prices for Gauguin’s works after his death rose steadily.

In France upon his death his reputation was besmirched, and he was portrayed as an anarchist, a man with no morals who had abandoned his family, a sexual obsessive, an alcoholic, morphine addict and leper.[xvi]

Vollard and others were keen for a French national gallery, preferably the Musée du Luxembourg, to buy work by Gauguin but the officials refused. However, international collectors were interested and at the first posthumous exhibition, in 1903, Vollard sold mainly to Russian and German buyers. The first major retrospective in 1906 exhibited 227 works by Gauguin - about a third of Gauguin’s known output today according to the catalogue raisonné produced by the Wildenstein Institute. By this time pictures originally purchased for 200F were going for several thousand. By 1910 they were going for between 10,000F and 18,000F and still mainly abroad.

We can trace the popularity of Gauguin’s work in America through newspaper articles of the day. The New York Tribune reviewed the 1906 exhibition in Paris.

Unquestionably the dominating feature of the retrospective section of the Autumn Salon is the revelation to the public of that weird, eccentric, mysterious painter Paul Gauguin forerunner of the independents and to whom it is claimed by an authoritative critic, M Denis, French painters of the younger school owe more than to any master since Manet.

Two hundred and twenty-seven of his works may be seen in the largest room of the Autumn salon. These range from his Yellow Christ of the Cross ..to his groups and frescos of native women of Tahiti.

These luminous paintings of Gauguin are keenly discussed. As one enters the Gauguin room the impression is similar to that felt when standing in the midst of a medieval church lighted by rich stained-glass windows. In his happiest moments Gauguin’s flights of genius were tempered by a synthetic vision and with a purity of conception suggestive of the Westphalian primitives of the sixteenth century. With his extraordinary merits and despite his grave faults Gauguin may after all be ranked as a sort of Polynesian Puvis de Chavannes although a venerable master of the French Institute applies to his work the famous but unjust dictum of Ruskin who criticising from the standpoint of the pre-Raphaelians the nocturnes of Whistler said ‘One must have the impudence of a cockney to throw such pots of paint at the head of the public.’[xvii]

Two years later The New York Sun featured a long article about Gauguin in which the writer acknowledged that back in the 1890s his work was ‘too new, too startling, too original for his generation, he is yet for the majority, but he may be the paint god of the twentieth Century.’[xviii]

In 1913 the Association of American Painters curated a first exhibition of French painters described as ‘Insurgents’ and including Cubists, Futurists and Post-Impressionists. In an article about the exhibition written at the time, Harriet Monroe explained that Gauguin was one of the three dead painters – along with Cezanne and Van Gogh – whom the modern radicals now claimed as founders of the movement. Gauguin, she described as ‘the disreputable world wanderer’.[xix] This seems to have been the first time Gauguin’s work was exhibited in America although he was not well represented as the pictures on his wall did not include any painted in Tahiti.

The first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London was at the Grafton Galleries in November 1910. It was dominated by Gauguin’s work with thirty-seven examples on the walls. 'You might imagine that you are entering an exhibition of the New Tahitian Art Club instead of the Graffon Gallery', wrote Martin Hardie.[xx] The exhibition firmly put Gauguin at the centre of debate in the London Art World. Many critics drew a distinction between western art and primitive art placing Gauguin’s paintings firmly into the latter category and his paintings were derided as ‘a simple fad, a decadent and morbid disposition … totally deprived of any sort of promise for the future.’[xxi] The paintings were much discussed and for the most part vilified.

However, one year later a new exhibition was opened at the Stafford Gallery this time centred around four pictures that had been purchased by Michael Sadler. The pictures were no longer being called degenerate and:

instead Gauguin was praised for his 'genius for decoration', his 'unusually strong and sensitive gift for drawing', and was turned into 'one of the most interesting personalities in modern art.[xxii]

In London it took less than a year for Gauguin’s work to move, in the eye of the British critics and public, from being mocked to being lauded.

In search of Gauguin

As soon as Gauguin’s fame began to spread, visitors to Tahiti went seeking his work. Rupert Brooke was clearly interested in the artist’s work. He wrote to a friend in 1914, while on route to the island, to imagine him ‘in the centre of a Gauguin picture, nakedly riding a squat horse into white surf.’[xxiii] He also complained when his ship was delayed that ‘a man got to Tahiti two months ahead me and found – and carried off – some Gauguin paintings on glass. Damn! Damn! Damn!’[xxiv]

Three years later it appears the last work by Gauguin, left on the island, was bought by Somerset Maugham, coincidently a painting on glass. In 1917 when he visited the island, he purchased a glass panelled door decorated by Gauguin. He paid 200F and kept it for 40 years before eventually selling it for $48,000 in 1948.

By the end of the First World War, it was known there were no art works by Gauguin left on the island. But this did not stop artists from visiting the island. In particular there have been a number of French artists who have travelled to Tahiti both to pay their respects to the land that Gauguin inhabited and to seek inspiration. Strangely I have not been able to find any significant French artist who travelled to Tahiti in the 1920s. Just missing that time period, was Henri Matisse. By 1930 he was in his sixties living in Nice with rheumatic neurosis in both arms and he decided to travel to Tahiti to see whether his visit might rejuvenate him as it had an ailing Gauguin. The journalist Tristan Rutherford explained how he got on:

On arrival his sketchbook was soon filled with tufted coconuts, banyan limbs, hibiscus flowers and birds-of-paradise. Most enjoyable of all was a Ma’a tahiti traditional feast. Read shrimp in coconut milk, suckling pick slow cooked on barbeque coals, clam curry and fried bananas. Then as now, life appeared effortless. He tracked down Gauguin’s son, Emile, who made his way as a simple Tahitian labourer. As Matisse recalled: “watching coconuts grow by day, fishing at night”. The artist ensured he packed black pearls and vanilla pods for gifts back home…

Did Gauguin’s voyage to Tahiti reinvent Matisse? On his return to Nice’s Promenade des Anglais in June 1930, the latter picked up his paintbrush and completed the masterpiece he postponed months before. The Yellow Dress warms the canvas like a Polynesian sunset with tropical slashes of emerald and ochre. Sailing away to paradise charms us all.[xxv] 

 

Other Frenchmen followed Matisse. Jacques Boullaire travelled there in 1935 and was inspired to create 168 wood engravings for a 1944 edition of Le Mariage de Loti. French born Swedish painter Pierre Heyman settled in Tahiti in 1935. The French post-impressionist Jean Masson moved to the island in the 1940s and Yves de Saint Front spent many years painting in Tahiti and Bora Bora after the second world war.

Was Gauguin an inspiration?

My interest is in the few writers and artists who did travel to Tahiti in the 1920s but none claimed to be inspired by Gauguin. For the artist George Biddle the attraction of Gauguin’s art was a shared sense of beauty. He admitted he ‘had no sympathy’ for Gauguin’s ‘neo-primitive use of line in drawing’ or the violent colours but he shared:

the instinctive, unreasoned, magnetic pull of the tropics. Lush vegetation, brilliant coloring, dark skins. The formalized, suggestive, yet deceptive beauty of primitive races.[xxvi]

In effect it was the subject matter of Gauguin’s paintings and not the style of painting that encouraged Biddle to want to visit Tahiti.

William Alister Macdonald, the Scottish watercolourist ran away to Tahiti with his mistress when in his sixties and remained there on and off for 35 years. Iain MacDonald in his excellent biography can find no indication that he was inspired by Gauguin or drawn to the island because of him. In fact, he had never planned to stay on the island, New Zealand had been his destination, but the wonderful light and beautiful locations made it the ideal place to continue painting his watercolours.

For Robert Keable, perhaps like Rupert Brooke, the attraction was different. He felt inspired by Gauguin’s behaviour and wrote reverentially about the man:

It is easy enough to blame a man for the desertion of his wife and family, especially when he leaves them no guaranteed existence, but Paul Gauguin’s act was a ‘gesture’ upon which it is well to dwell….. Millions of us in these days find ourselves tied in some place at some job in which we know only too bitterly and well that something in us will never be fulfilled. We shall continue to live, we shall make a reasonable income, we shall rear a family, we shall be increasingly knit about with human ties and responsibilities, and in that we shall be respectably buried in a cemetery beneath a headstone ….Here is a man who lifted his head to the brazen heaven and flung defiance back in answer to the silence of his mother’s God. Here is a man who, even more bravely, rent tatters the careful web of social custom and traditional duty and went out naked. Here is a man who weighed every respectability against some half articulate cry in his own soul and dared to see, in the light of reality, that there was literally no balance at all…. He was no moral Hercules. He was not even particularly wise. He did not find perfect peace or even satisfaction. Does anyone anywhere?[xxvii]

As we will see Keable was fascinated by Gauguin and ended up living in his house. It is surely no coincidence that Keable’s publisher, good friend and godfather to his first child was Michael Sadler, whose father had purchased probably the first four Gauguin’s ever sold in England.

But I suspect Keable was an exception. Men like Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall and Dean Frisbie seem to have been drawn to Tahiti via the great writers, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London, and by the success of Frederick O’Brien’s books.   

Others drawn to Tahiti in the 1920’s by a respect for a man who ‘rent tatters the social custom and traditional duty’, I suspect were inspired not by Gauguin, but by fictional character called Charles Strickland, from Somerset Maugham’s novel Moon and Sixpence.

References