Paul Gauguin: the story on HearLore

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born on the 7th of June 1848, the same year that revolutionary upheavals swept across Europe, marking the beginning of a life that would eventually shatter the conventions of Western art. He was not born into poverty, but into a family of privilege and political intrigue. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a liberal journalist who fled France to escape censorship, while his mother, Aline Chazal, was the daughter of a French engraver and Flora Tristan, a famous socialist activist and author. Flora Tristan's life was cut short by a pistol wound to her heart, a bullet that had lodged three centimeters from her heart, too close to be safely removed. This traumatic family history, combined with a childhood spent in the lush, exotic landscapes of Peru, left an indelible mark on the young Paul. He was only 18 months old when his family settled in Peru, where he enjoyed a privileged upbringing attended by nursemaids and servants. The idyllic nature of his early years in South America would haunt him for the rest of his life, creating a deep-seated longing for a primitive, uncorrupted existence that he would spend his career trying to recapture. When his family returned to France, the transition was jarring, and the loss of his Peruvian paradise became a driving force behind his artistic vision. Gauguin's early life was a tapestry of privilege and tragedy, setting the stage for a man who would eventually reject the comforts of European civilization to seek a more authentic existence in the Pacific.

The Artistic Rebellion

In 1882, the Paris stock market crashed, and Gauguin's lucrative career as a stockbroker, earning 30,000 francs a year, came to an abrupt end. This financial disaster forced him to make a radical decision: to abandon his successful business life and pursue painting full-time. He was 34 years old, and his art education was largely self-taught, shaped by his associations with other artists rather than formal academic training. His entry into the art world was facilitated by his acquaintance with Camille Pissarro, a leading Impressionist who took on a mentor role for Gauguin. Pissarro introduced him to other Impressionist artists and techniques, and Gauguin exhibited with the Impressionists in the early 1880s. However, he soon began developing his distinct style, characterized by a bolder use of color and less traditional subject matter. His work in Brittany and Martinique showcased his inclination towards depicting native life and landscapes. By the 1890s, Gauguin's art took a significant turn during his time in Tahiti, where he sought a refuge from Western civilization. His paintings from that period, characterized by vivid colors and Symbolist themes, would prove highly successful among European viewers for their exploration of the relationships between people, nature, and the spiritual world. Gauguin's art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of dealer Ambroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career and assisted in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris. His work was influential on the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and he is well known for his relationship with Vincent and Theo van Gogh.

When was Paul Gauguin born and where did he spend his early childhood?

Paul Gauguin was born on the 7th of June 1848 and spent his early childhood in Peru. He was 18 months old when his family settled there, enjoying a privileged upbringing attended by nursemaids and servants before returning to France.

What happened between Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh in 1888?

Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh spent nine weeks painting together at the Yellow House in Arles in 1888 before their relationship deteriorated. On the evening of the 23rd of December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his own left ear and Gauguin left Arles, never seeing him again.

When did Paul Gauguin travel to Tahiti and what was his primary goal?

Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on the 1st of April 1891 with the intent to escape European civilization and find a primitive, uncorrupted existence. He established his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, to create paintings depicting Tahitian life and culture.

Where did Paul Gauguin die and on what date?

Paul Gauguin died suddenly on the morning of the 8th of May 1903 in Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. He was buried in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in Atuona at 2 p.m. the following day.

What caused Paul Gauguin's health problems and how did he treat them?

Paul Gauguin suffered from heart palpitations, leg pain, and general debility which local doctors diagnosed as heart problems or early signs of cardiovascular syphilis. He treated his pain with morphine injections and laudanum before his death in 1903.

The Tahitian Exile

By 1890, Gauguin had conceived the project of making Tahiti his next artistic destination. A successful auction of paintings in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1891, along with other events such as a banquet and a benefit concert, provided the necessary funds. The auction had been greatly helped by a flattering review from Octave Mirbeau, courted by Gauguin through Camille Pissarro. After visiting his wife and children in Copenhagen, for what turned out to be the last time, Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on the 1st of April 1891, promising to return a rich man and make a fresh start. His avowed intent was to escape European civilization and everything that is artificial and conventional. Nevertheless, he took care to take with him a collection of visual stimuli in the form of photographs, drawings, and prints. He spent the first three months in Papeete, the capital of the colony and already much influenced by French and European culture. His biographer Belinda Thomson observes that he must have been disappointed in his vision of a primitive idyll. He was unable to afford the pleasure-seeking lifestyle in Papeete, and an early attempt at a portrait, Suzanne Bambridge, was not well liked. He decided to set up his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, some distance from Papeete, installing himself in a native-style bamboo hut. Here he executed paintings depicting Tahitian life such as Fatata te Miti (By the Sea) and Ia Orana Maria (Ave Maria), the latter to become his most prized Tahitian painting. Many of his finest paintings date from this period. His first portrait of a Tahitian model is thought to be Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower). The painting is notable for the care with which it delineates Polynesian features. He sent the painting to his patron George-Daniel de Monfreid, a friend of Schuffenecker, who was to become Gauguin's devoted champion in Tahiti. By late summer 1892, this painting was being displayed at Goupil's gallery in Paris. Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews believes that Gauguin's encounter with exotic sensuality in Tahiti, so evident in the painting, was by far the most important aspect of his sojourn there. He often rendered titles of his works in Tahitian, although some of these titles were misconjugated to a point where they were hard to understand by native Tahitian speakers themselves. Gauguin was lent copies of 1837 Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan and 1855 État de la société tahitienne à l'arrivée des Européens, containing full accounts of Tahiti's forgotten culture and religion. Gauguin was fascinated by the accounts of Arioi society and their god Oro. Because these accounts contained no illustrations and the Tahitian models had in any case long disappeared, he could give free rein to his imagination. He executed some twenty paintings and a dozen woodcarvings over the next year. The first of these was Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), representing Oro's terrestrial wife Vairaumati, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His illustrated notebook of the time, Noa Noa, is preserved in the Louvre and was published in facsimile form in 1951. In all, Gauguin sent nine of his paintings to Monfreid in Paris. These were eventually exhibited in Copenhagen in a joint exhibition with the late Vincent van Gogh. Reports that they had been well received (though in fact only two of the Tahitian paintings were sold and his earlier paintings were unfavorably compared with van Gogh's) were sufficiently encouraging for Gauguin to contemplate returning with some seventy others he had completed. He had in any case largely run out of funds, depending on a state grant for a free passage home. In addition, he had some health problems diagnosed as heart problems by the local doctor, which Mathews suggests may have been the early signs of cardiovascular syphilis. Gauguin later wrote a travelogue (first published 1901) titled Noa Noa, originally conceived as commentary on his paintings and describing his experiences in Tahiti. Modern critics have suggested that the contents of the book were in part fantasized and plagiarized. In it, he revealed that he had at this time taken a 13-year-old girl as native wife or vahine (the Tahitian word for woman), a marriage contracted in the course of a single afternoon. This was Teha'amana, called Tehura in the travelogue, who was pregnant by him by the end of summer 1892. Teha'amana was the subject of several of Gauguin's paintings, including Merahi metua no Tehamana and the celebrated Spirit of the Dead Watching, as well as a notable woodcarving Tehura now in the Musée d'Orsay. By the end of July 1893, Gauguin had decided to leave Tahiti and he would never see Teha'amana or their child again even after returning to the island several years later.

The Marquesas Islands

Gauguin had nurtured his plan of settling in the Marquesas ever since seeing a collection of intricately carved Marquesan bowls and weapons in Papeete during his first months in Tahiti. However, he found a society that, as in Tahiti, had lost its cultural identity. Of all the Pacific island groups, the Marquesas were the most affected by the import of Western diseases (especially tuberculosis). An 18th-century population of some 80,000 had declined to just 4,000. Catholic missionaries held sway and, in their effort to control drunkenness and promiscuity, obliged all native children to attend missionary schools into their teens. French colonial rule was enforced by a gendarmerie noted for its malevolence and stupidity, while traders, both Western and Chinese, exploited the natives appallingly. Gauguin settled in Atuona on the island of Hiva-Oa, arriving on the 16th of September 1901. This was the administrative capital of the island group, but considerably less developed than Papeete, although there was an efficient and regular steamer service between the two. There was a military doctor but no hospital. The doctor was relocated to Papeete the following February, and thereafter Gauguin had to rely on the island's two health care workers, the Vietnamese exile Nguyen Van Cam (Ky Dong), who had settled on the island but had no formal medical training, and the Protestant pastor Paul Vernier, who had studied medicine in addition to theology. Both of these were to become close friends. He bought a plot of land in the center of the town from the Catholic mission, having first ingratiated himself with the local bishop by attending mass regularly. This bishop was Monseigneur Rogatien-Joseph Martin, initially well disposed to Gauguin because he was aware that Gauguin had sided with the Catholic party in Tahiti in his journalism. Gauguin built a two-floor house on his plot, sturdy enough to survive a later cyclone that washed away most other dwellings in the town. He was helped in the task by the two best Marquesan carpenters on the island, one of them called Tioka, tattooed from head to toe in the traditional Marquesan way (a tradition suppressed by the missionaries). Tioka was a deacon in Vernier's congregation and became Gauguin's neighbor after the cyclone when Gauguin gifted him a corner of his plot. The ground floor was open-air and used for dining and living, while the top floor was used for sleeping and as his studio. The door to the top floor was decorated with a polychrome wood-carved lintel and jambs that still survive in museums. The lintel named the house as Maison du Jouir (i.e. House of Pleasure), while the jambs echoed his earlier 1889 wood-carving Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses (i.e. Be in Love, You Will Be Happy). The walls were decorated with, amongst other things, his prized collection of forty-five pornographic photographs he had purchased in Port Said on his way out from France. In the early days at least, until Gauguin found a vahine, the house drew appreciative crowds in the evenings from the natives, who came to stare at the pictures and party half the night away. Needless to say, all this did not endear Gauguin to the bishop, still less when Gauguin erected two sculptures he placed at the foot of his steps lampooning the bishop and a servant reputed to be the bishop's mistress, and yet still less when Gauguin later attacked the unpopular missionary school system. The sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard, is to be found at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, while its pendant piece Thérèse realized a record $30,965,000 for a Gauguin sculpture at a Christie's New York 2015 sale. These were among at least eight sculptures that adorned the house according to a posthumous inventory, most of which are lost today. Together they represented a very public attack on the hypocrisy of the church in sexual matters. State funding for the missionary schools had ceased as a result of the 1901 Associations Bill promulgated throughout the French empire. The schools continued with difficulty as private institutions, but these difficulties were compounded when Gauguin established that attendance at any given school was only compulsory within a catchment area of some two and a half miles radius. This led to numerous teenage daughters being withdrawn from the schools (Gauguin called this process rescuing). He took as vahine one such girl, Vaeoho (also called Marie-Rose), the 14-year-old daughter of a native couple who lived in an adjoining valley six miles distant. This can scarcely have been a pleasant task for her as Gauguin's sores were by then extremely noxious and required daily dressing. Nevertheless, she lived willingly with him and the following year gave birth to a healthy daughter whose descendants continue to live on the island. By November, he had settled into his new home with Vaeoho, a cook (Kahui), two other servants (nephews of Tioka), his dog, Pegau (a play on his initials PG), and a cat. The house itself, although in the center of the town, was set amongst trees and secluded from view. The partying ceased and he began a period of productive work, sending twenty canvases to Vollard the following April. He had thought he would find new motifs in the Marquesas, writing to Monfreid. In fact, his Marquesas work for the most part can only be distinguished from his Tahiti work by experts or by their dates, paintings such as Two Women remaining uncertain in their location. For Anna Szech, what distinguishes them is their repose and melancholy, albeit containing elements of disquiet. Thus, in the second of two versions of Cavaliers sur la Plage (Riders on the Beach), gathering clouds and foamy breakers suggest an impending storm while the two distant figures on grey horses echo similar figures in other paintings that are taken to symbolize death. Gauguin chose to paint landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies at this time, with an eye to Vollard's clientele, avoiding the primitive and lost paradise themes of his Tahiti paintings. But there is a significant trio of pictures from this last period that suggest deeper concerns. The first two of these are Jeune fille à l'éventail (Young Girl with Fan) and Le Sorcier d'Hiva Oa (Marquesan Man in a Red Cape). The model for Jeune fille was the red-headed Tohotaua, the daughter of a chieftain on a neighboring island. The portrait appears to have been taken from a portrait photograph of Tohotaua by Louis Grelet that Vernier later sent to Vollard. The model for Le sorcier may have been Haapuani, an accomplished dancer as well as a feared magician, who was a close friend of Gauguin's and, according to Bengt Danielsson, married to Tohotau. Szech notes that the white color of Tohotau's dress is a symbol of power and death in Polynesian culture, the sitter doing duty for a Maohi culture as a whole threatened with extinction. Le Sorcier appears to have been executed at the same time and depicts a long-haired young man wearing an exotic red cape. The androgynous nature of the image has attracted critical attention, giving rise to speculation that Gauguin intended to depict a māhū (i.e. a third gender person) rather than a taua or priest. The third picture of the trio is the mysterious and beautiful Contes barbares (Primitive Tales) featuring Tohotau again at the right. The left figure is Jacob Meyer de Haan, a painter friend of Gauguin's from their Pont-Aven days who had died a few years previously, while the middle figure is again androgynous, identified by some as Haapuani. The Buddha-like pose and the lotus blossoms suggests to Elizabeth Childs that the picture is a meditation on the perpetual cycle of life and the possibility of rebirth. As these paintings reached Vollard after Gauguin's sudden death, nothing is known about Gauguin's intentions in their execution.

The Final Years

In March 1902, the governor of French Polynesia, arrived in the Marquesas to make an inspection. He was accompanied by Édouard Charlier as head of the judicial system. Charlier was an amateur painter who had been befriended by Gauguin when he first arrived as magistrate at Papeete in 1895. However, their relationship had turned to enmity when Charlier refused to prosecute Gauguin's then vahine Pau'ura for a number of trivial offences, allegedly housebreaking and theft, she had committed at Puna'auia while Gauguin was away working in Papeete. Gauguin had gone so far as to publish an open letter attacking Charlier about the affair in Les Guêpes. Petit, presumably suitably forewarned, refused to see Gauguin to deliver the settlers' protests (Gauguin their spokesman) about the invidious taxation system, which saw most revenue from the Marquesas spent in Papeete. Gauguin responded in April by refusing to pay his taxes and encouraging the settlers, traders, and planters, to do likewise. At around the same time, Gauguin's health began to deteriorate again, revisited by the same familiar constellation of symptoms involving pain in the legs, heart palpitations, and general debility. The pain in his injured ankle grew insupportable and in July he was obliged to order a trap from Papeete so that he could get about town. By September the pain was so extreme that he resorted to morphine injections. However, he was sufficiently concerned by the habit he was developing to turn his syringe set over to a neighbor, relying instead on laudanum. His sight was also beginning to fail him, as attested by the spectacles he wears in his last known self-portrait. This was actually a portrait commenced by his friend Ky Dong that he completed himself, thus accounting for its uncharacteristic style. It shows a man tired and aged, yet not entirely defeated. For a while he considered returning to Europe, to Spain, to get treatment. Monfreid advised him. In July 1902, Vaeoho, by then seven months pregnant, left Gauguin to return home to her neighboring valley of Hekeani to have her baby amongst family and friends. She gave birth in September but did not return. Gauguin did not subsequently take another vahine. It was at this time that his quarrel with Bishop Martin over missionary schools reached its height. The local gendarme, Désiré Charpillet, at first friendly to Gauguin, wrote a report to the administrator of the island group, who resided on the neighboring island of Nuku Hiva, criticizing Gauguin for encouraging natives to withdraw their children from school as well as encouraging settlers to withhold payment of their taxes. As luck would have it, the post of administrator had recently been filled by François Picquenot, an old friend of Gauguin's from Tahiti and essentially sympathetic to him. Picquenot advised Charpillet not to take any action over the schools issue, since Gauguin had the law on his side, but authorized Charpillet to seize goods from Gauguin in lieu of payment of taxes if all else failed. Possibly prompted by loneliness, and at times unable to paint, Gauguin took to writing. In 1901, the manuscript of Noa Noa that Gauguin had prepared along with woodcuts during his interlude in France was finally published with Morice's poems in book form in the La Plume edition (the manuscript itself is now lodged in the Louvre museum). Sections of it (including his account of Teha'amana) had previously been published without woodcuts in 1897 in La Revue Blanche, while he himself had published extracts in Les Guêpes while he was editor. The La Plume edition was planned to include his woodcuts, but he withheld permission to print them on smooth paper as the publishers wished. In truth, he had grown uninterested in the venture with Morice and never saw a copy, declining an offer of one hundred complimentary copies. Nevertheless, its publication inspired him to consider writing other books. At the beginning of the year (1902), he had revised an old 1896, 97 manuscript, L'Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme (The Modern Spirit and Catholicism), on the Roman Catholic Church, adding some twenty pages containing insights gleaned from his dealings with Bishop Martin. He sent this text to Bishop Martin, who responded by sending him an illustrated history of the Church. Gauguin returned the book with critical remarks he later published in his autobiographical reminiscences. He next prepared a witty and well-documented essay, Racontars de Rapin (Tales of a Dabbler) on critics and art criticism, which he sent for publication to André Fontainas, art critic at the Mercure de France whose favorable review of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? had done much to restore his reputation. Fontainas, however, replied that he dared not publish it. It was not subsequently published until 1951. On the 27th of May that year, the steamer service, Croix du Sud, was shipwrecked off the Apataki atoll, and for a period of three months the island was left without mail or supplies. When mail service resumed, Gauguin penned an angry attack on Governor Petit in an open letter, complaining amongst other things about the way they had been abandoned following the shipwreck. The letter was published by L'Indepéndant, the successor newspaper to Les Guêpes, that November in Papeete. Petit had in fact followed an independent and pro-native policy, to the disappointment of the Roman Catholic Party, and the newspaper was preparing an attack on him. Gauguin also sent the letter to the Mercure de France, which published a redacted version of it after his death. He followed this with a private letter to the head of the gendarmerie in Papeete, complaining about his own local gendarme Charpillet's excesses in making prisoners labor for him. Danielsson notes that, while these and similar complaints were well-founded, the motivation for them all was wounded vanity and simple animosity. As it happened, the relatively supportive Charpillet was replaced that December by another gendarme, Jean-Paul Claverie, from Tahiti, much less well disposed to Gauguin and who in fact had fined him in his earliest Mataiea days for public indecency, having caught him bathing naked in a local stream following complaints from the missionaries there. His health further deteriorated in December to the extent that he was scarcely able to paint. He began an autobiographical memoir he called Avant et après (Before and After) (published in translation in the U.S. as Intimate Journals), which he completed over the next two months. The title referred to his experiences before and after coming to Tahiti and as tribute to his own grandmother's unpublished memoir Past and Future. His memoir proved to be a fragmented collection of observations about life in Polynesia, his own life, and comments on literature and paintings. He included in it attacks on subjects as diverse as the local gendarmerie, Bishop Martin, his wife Mette and the Danes in general, and concluded with a description of his personal philosophy conceiving life as an existential struggle to reconcile opposing binaries. Mathews notes two closing remarks as a distillation of his philosophy: He sent the manuscript to Fontainas for editing, but the rights reverted to Mette after Gauguin's death, and it was not published until 1918 (in a facsimile edition); the American translation appearing in 1921.

The Death of a Legend

At the beginning of 1903, Gauguin engaged in a campaign designed to expose the incompetence of the island's gendarmes, in particular Jean-Paul Claverie, for taking the side of the natives directly in a case involving the alleged drunkenness of a group of them. Claverie, however, escaped censure. At the beginning of February, Gauguin wrote to the administrator, François Picquenot, alleging corruption by one of Claverie's subordinates. Picquenot investigated the allegations but could not substantiate them. Claverie responded by filing a charge against Gauguin of libeling a gendarme. He was subsequently fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months' imprisonment by the local magistrate on the 27th of March 1903. Gauguin immediately filed an appeal in Papeete and set about raising the funds to travel to Papeete to hear his appeal. At this time Gauguin was very weak and in great pain and resorted once again to using morphine. He died suddenly on the morning of the 8th of May 1903. Earlier, he had sent for his pastor, Paul Vernier, complaining of fainting fits. They had chatted together, and Vernier had left, believing him in a stable condition. However, Gauguin's neighbor, Tioka, found him dead at 11 o'clock, confirming the fact in the traditional Marquesan way by biting his scalp in an attempt to revive him. By his bedside was an empty bottle of laudanum, which has given rise to speculation that he was the victim of an overdose. Vernier believed he died of a heart attack. Gauguin was buried in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery (Cimetière Calvaire), Atuona, Hiva 'Oa, at 2 p.m. the next day. In 1973, a bronze cast of his Oviri figure was placed on his grave, as he had indicated was his wish. Ironically, his nearest neighbor in the cemetery is Bishop Martin, his grave surmounted by a large white cross. Vernier wrote an account of Gauguin's last days and burial, reproduced in O'Brien's edition of Gauguin's letters to Monfreid. Word of Gauguin's death did not reach France (to Monfreid) until the 23rd of August 1903. In the absence of a will, his less valuable effects were auctioned in Atuona while his letters, manuscripts, and paintings were auctioned in Papeete on the 5th of September 1903. Mathews notes that this speedy dispersal of his effects led to the loss of much valuable information about his later years. Thomson notes that the auction inventory of his effects (some of which were burned as pornography) revealed a life that was not as impoverished or primitive as he had liked to maintain. Mette Gauguin in due course received the proceeds of the auction, some 4,000 francs. One of the paintings auctioned in Papeete was Maternité II, a smaller version of Maternité I in the Hermitage Museum. The original was painted at the time his then vahine, Pau'ura, in Puna'auia, gave birth to their son Emile. It is not known why he painted the smaller copy. It was sold for 150 francs to a French naval officer, Commandant Cochin, who said that Governor Petit himself had bid up to 135 francs for the painting. It was sold at Sotheby's for US$39,208,000 in 2004. The Paul Gauguin Cultural Center at Atuona has a reconstruction of the Maison du Jouir. The original house stood empty for a few years, the door still carrying Gauguin's carved lintel. This was eventually recovered, four of the five pieces held at the Musée D'Orsay and the fifth at the Paul Gauguin Museum in Tahiti. In 2007, four rotten molars, which may have been Gauguin's, were found by archaeologists at the bottom of a well that he built on the island of Hiva Oa, on the Marquese Islands. In 2014, forensic examination of these teeth threw into question the conventional belief that Gauguin had suffered from syphilis. DNA examination established that the teeth were almost certainly Gauguin's, but no traces were found of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, the standard treatment for syphilis at the time, suggesting either that Gauguin did not suffer from syphilis or that he was not being treated for it. Gauguin outlived three of his children; his favorite daughter Aline died of pneumonia, his son Clovis died of a blood infection following a hip operation, and a daughter, whose birth was portrayed in Gauguin's painting of 1896 Te tamari no atua, the child of Gauguin's young Tahitian mistress, Pau'ura, died only a few days after her birth on Christmas Day 1896. His son, Émile Gauguin, worked as a construction engineer in the U.S. and is buried in Lemon Bay Historical Cemetery, in Florida. Another son, Jean René, became a well-known sculptor and a staunch socialist. He died on the 21st of April 1961 in Copenhagen. Pola (Paul Rollon) became an artist and art critic and wrote a memoir, My Father, Paul Gauguin.