PAUL GAUGUIN
His Life and Art
BY
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
_WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS_
NICHOLAS L. BROWN
NEW YORK
MCMXXI
[Illustration: Self-portrait of Gauguin.]
TO
M.T.H.S.
WHO HELPED ME WITH
ADVICE AND CRITICISM
"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)
PAUL GAUGUIN
PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885
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 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.
[Illustration: 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 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 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 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 note-books 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 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 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. 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 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.
[Illustration: 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.