The life of Paul Gauguin is the stuff of legend. Or several legends. There’s the Romantic visionary invoked by his friend August Strindberg—“a child taking his toys to pieces to make new ones, rejecting and defying and preferring a red sky to everybody else’s blue one.” There’s the voracious malcontent whom Edgar Degas pegged as a “hungry wolf without a collar.” There’s the accomplished swordsman and brawny genius hammed up by Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life, who takes a break from bickering with Vincent van Gogh to growl, “I’m talking about women, man, women. I like ’em fat and vicious and not too smart.” And there’s the 21st-century trope of the paint-smattered, colonizing Humbert Humbert, bedding 13-year-old girls and sowing syphilis throughout the South Seas.
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This arc from rebel to swashbuckling art hero to repellent villain tells us less about the artist than it does about the audience (Quinn won an Oscar for that moody growling in 1957). Still, given the hand-wringing and self-righteous mudslinging that have accompanied recent Gauguin exhibitions, the time is ripe to ask what we actually know, and how that knowledge should impinge on our experience of art, if at all.
Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux’s new biography of Gauguin, aims “not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.” Charting his life from birth (in Paris in 1848) to death (in French Polynesia in 1903), she makes use of the recently recovered manuscript of his stream-of-consciousness semi-memoir, Avant et après, as well as fresh conclusions about his sexual health suggested by his teeth. More broadly, she chooses to consider events in view of historical circumstance rather than moral dicta. (Prideaux, whose previous books have examined the lives of Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edvard Munch, has a gift for disrupting snap judgments about difficult men.) If the Gauguin who emerges here is not easy to love, he does seem of a piece with the willfully contradictory, persistently gripping art he left behind.
The biographical facts are improbably cinematic. On his mother’s side, he traced his ancestry back to the Borgias; the family tree included a pope, a saint, the viceroy of Peru, and his grandmother, the rabble-rousing feminist Flora Tristan. (Karl Marx was a fan.) Gauguin’s childhood might have been dreamed up, tag team, by Gabriel García Márquez and Émile Zola. When he was an infant, his family set sail for Peru, where his journalist father planned to establish a left-wing newspaper and his mother hoped to reclaim an inheritance. His father dropped dead en route in Tierra del Fuego, but his mother continued on to Lima with her two small children, joining the palatial household of a great-uncle. She never got the money, but as one of the rare Europeans to take a serious interest in pre-Columbian art, she acquired a substantial collection of ancient Moche ceramics. Those animated dogs and portrait heads would burrow deep into her son’s imagination.
By Sue Prideaux
For his part, Gauguin recalled running free in the streets with the enslaved girl who was his closest companion and being visited in the night by a madman who lived on an adjacent roof. When he returned to France at the age of 7, he couldn’t speak the language and understood none of the social codes. “I am a savage from Peru” was the belligerent self-explanation he would use for the rest of his life. Boarding school provided a bit of classical education and a habit of skeptical inquiry, but he flunked out of higher education and, with no discernible skills, went to sea as a lowly ship’s boy at 17.
Returning six years later, he took up a position trading futures on the Paris Bourse arranged for him by Gustave Arosa, a financier, an art collector, and his de facto stepfather. (Arosa and Gauguin’s mother had had a very French arrangement.) Improbably, Gauguin excelled. He disdained most of his colleagues—“prosperity did not make him clubbable,” Prideaux notes—but he made lots of money, fell in love, and married a Dane, Mette Gad, who shared his indifference to bourgeois convention. “Carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Gauguin began, for the first time, to take an interest in art—initially as a collector of the new Impressionism and then dabbling on his own. He enlisted the help of Arosa’s friend Camille Pissarro and began painting softly churning landscapes en plein air. Within a few years, he was showing with the Impressionists himself. Money continued to roll in from the Bourse and, Prideaux writes, “delightful babies magically appeared at two-year intervals.”
This halcyon bliss was too good to last. When the market crashed in December 1882, Gauguin was wiped out and lost his job. He and Gad had saved nothing, and Arosa, his safety net, died within months. In lieu of any new employment opportunities, Gauguin decided that he would support his wife and five children as an avant-garde painter. (Like many people who enjoy early success in the markets, he did a lot of magical thinking about money.) To economize, they moved to Copenhagen, but his painting stalled, so they decided that he should return to France and send for the family once he was again on a secure footing. Gad would stay in Copenhagen with the children, teaching French and sometimes selling things from his art collection to make ends meet.
Prideaux depicts Gauguin’s ensuing poverty without romance—the cold, the filth, the food insecurity. The son he briefly had charge of grew malnourished and contracted smallpox. The only job Gauguin managed to get was pasting up posters. As for the Paris art world, it was abuzz with Georges Seurat, color theory, and Pointillism. Gauguin, who never met a system he didn’t despise, was exasperated. He decamped to Brittany, with its dramatic coast and folkloric peasants speaking their strange Celtic tongue, and there his art stopped looking like anybody else’s.
Where Impressionist landscapes had dissolved in light, Gauguin’s grew solid. The brushwork flickered, but the edges were hard. Breton Women Chatting (1886) is packed with elbows and aprons and acrobatic headdresses. He cribbed its tipped-up perspective from Japanese woodcuts; the square-shouldered, profile posture from ancient Egypt; the girl fiddling with her shoe from Degas. This kind of appropriation and stitching-together had been practiced by Degas and Édouard Manet, but Gauguin’s painting doesn’t look like theirs either. The strange mix of naturalism and frozen poses, the lasso-like outlines, the marriage of the familiar and the otherworldly would become his brand.
Gauguin’s new mode attracted fervent acolytes among younger artists, but it produced nothing resembling an income stream, so he sailed to Panama with a friend in pursuit of a job through his sister’s husband. He was again disappointed. From there he went to Martinique (“I have always had a fancy for running away,” he wrote), where he lived in a hut, contracted malaria, and painted dense landscapes that suggest the interlocking shapes and eventful surfaces of tapestries. Those paintings stunned Vincent van Gogh and his art-dealer brother, Theo, who proposed that the two painters spend some months together in Arles, living and working on Theo’s dime. The experiment ended in a bloody spectacle, with a straight razor, a severed ear, and Gauguin briefly accused of murder when the police thought that the razor was his and that Van Gogh was dead. (The Van Gogh brothers held him blameless, but the experience was harrowing for everyone.)
Soon afterward, the 1889 Exposition Universelle, with its unprecedented display of distant cultures, gave fresh fuel to Gauguin’s wanderlust. He was far better traveled than most Europeans, but the Javanese dancers and the full-scale replica of a tower from Angkor Wat were revelations—alternative ways of conceptualizing narrative and space, of arranging figures, of living. He was now in his 40s and years had passed since he’d left Copenhagen, but he and Gad remained married and he continued to seek means of uniting his family. He began applying for jobs in French colonies, hoping for something in Tonkin (for its proximity to Angkor Wat) or perhaps Madagascar with a friend. In the end, he headed for Tahiti, without a job but with an agreement from the government to buy a painting produced there. Before leaving, he wrote Gad promising that they would all be together within three years.
Papeete, the capital, was a disappointment: brick buildings laid out in a grid, populated by pompous Frenchmen and Native women cloaked in missionary-imposed smocks known as Mother Hubbards. It was, he wrote, “the Europe which I had thought to shake off” only worse, given “the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.” He alienated the officials who might have offered him work and washed out as a portrait painter. (Flattery was not in his wheelhouse.) So he went off to a remote village in search of the prelapsarian Tahiti of his imagination.
Gauguin had little money, lacked the ability to fish or farm, and was bad at languages, yet the Tahitians accepted and assisted him. Somehow he soon became “married” to a teenager named Teha’amana, or so the story goes; our key source of information about her and the relationship is Gauguin’s romanticized account of his early Tahitian adventures, Noa Noa, written after the fact for a French audience to build a poetic context for his paintings. (Noa noa means “fragrance.”) In one passage, he writes about another woman in his village, calling her “not at all handsome according to our aesthetic rules. She was beautiful.” The same might be said of the paintings that now poured forth, described by Prideaux as “a collective hymn of love” for Teha’amana “and, through her, for the place and its people.”
In his extraordinary 1891 painting Ia Orana Maria (“Hail Mary”), an Indigenous Mary carries an Indigenous Christ child on one shoulder (both with halos), while Indigenous worshippers pray and a yellow-winged angel lurks in flowering bushes. (The nonwhite casting, Prideaux notes, was considered “blasphemous for over half a century.”) It’s a mash-up of Renaissance iconography, Javanese postures, and the busy patterning of the Pre-Raphaelites, but everything fits together with the kind of breathless sublimity you see in Fra Angelico: a world that is both physical and metaphysical, intoxicating and inevitable.
This idyll was interrupted by, of all things, success. Van Gogh had died in 1890, but in Copenhagen, the first joint exhibition of his work and Gauguin’s, in 1893, had stirred great excitement. Urged to return to Europe, Gauguin made the 10-week voyage back. Remarkably, he still aimed to bring his European family to Tahiti, but once again, his sales proved insufficient. He took a studio in Paris, and then, on a trip to Brittany, he got into a row with some locals, who shattered his leg. Months in the hospital were followed by years of dependence on laudanum and morphine. The leg never fully healed, but by July 1895 he was well enough to re-embark for the South Seas.
Though Papeete was even worse than he remembered, his need for medical attention kept him nearby. He built a hut in a village a few miles from the capital. Teha’amana came to visit for a few days, but in Gauguin’s absence she had taken a Tahitian husband, to whom she returned. A new teenager, Pau’ura, filled her place, and Gauguin returned to his easel, painting dreamy narratives with mythological overtones, such as Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), but his life refused to settle into the old idyll. He lost his home, and even attempted suicide. Unable to pay his hospital bills, he was declared “indigent.”
Eventually Gauguin got a job as a draftsman for the department of public works and began writing political commentary for a local paper, but his sense of having betrayed his values and gifts in Tahiti’s colonial milieu only grew. In 1901, he moved on to the remote island of Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas. Pau’ura chose to remain in Tahiti with their infant son. In Europe, his paintings began to turn a profit at long last, but two years later he was dead, at 54.
Posthumous exhibitions cemented Gauguin’s status as the most transformative of the post-Impressionist painters. His willingness to reimagine the visible world pointed the way to symbolism, expressionism, and abstraction. Meanwhile, the warmth and muscular grace of his Polynesian paintings made them perennially popular. For a time, this combination of wayward emotional expression and cultural openness, this embrace of other forms of beauty, seemed to embody a new, modern ideal.
All of this got turned on its head beginning in the 1970s, as the art world became sensitized to the deep inequities between men and women, white and nonwhite, colonizer and colonized. Paintings whose reverence for Indigenous people had once shocked were now held in contempt, viewed as defiling those same people. Gauguin was castigated for failing to shake off European pictorial traditions, and for appropriating non-European traditions. The man who from the age of 7 had considered himself an outsider to Western civilization was now seen as the abusive beneficiary of its entitlements. Because political power was vested in European men, interpersonal relations were presumed to follow suit. A narrative of exploitation was inferred. A Gauguin retrospective last year occasioned the headline: “Paul Gauguin Was a Violent Paedophile. Should the National Gallery of Australia Be Staging a Major Exhibition of His Work?” Its description of the artist as a “serial rapist” has been widely repeated online.
We have no testimony from Teha’amana, and other than Pau’ura’s late-in-life recollections of a man she fondly referred to as a “rascal,” none from his other partners, so this accusation presumably reflects current definitions of statutory rape. Prideaux sees Teha’amana as a victim of her own family, who apparently offered her up before Gauguin had asked, as well as of “the lust of the much older European man.” She is also at pains to note that even in France itself the age of consent was then 13 (in most American states, it was even younger), and that sex between teenagers and adults was “unremarkable.” People today may find this repugnant, but what Teha’amana felt about it all, we cannot know.
New scientific evidence, however, sheds light on one charge. An excavation of Gauguin’s Hiva Oa property in 2000 turned up four teeth whose DNA matched that of his father’s remains and of living descendants in Europe and Polynesia. Tests run for cadmium, mercury, and arsenic—the standard treatments for syphilis—were negative. Absence of treatment is not absence of illness, of course, but given how much time Gauguin spent in hospitals, that such a familiar disease would have been missed seems unlikely. Actual evidence for his syphilitic status appears to be nonexistent.
For a man whose sex life has attracted so much attention, Gauguin appears surprisingly circumspect in Prideaux’s telling. Surrounded by randy young artists helping themselves to everything on offer in Brittany, he remained “strait-laced about casual sex.” Of brothels, he commented to a friend: “Not my cup of tea.”
In art, he derided the pliant painted ladies who dotted the walls of the Paris Salon clad in nothing but allegorical pretense, calling them “bordello art.” The women he depicted, by contrast, come across as individual, self-possessed people. They rarely smile and are never coy. The girls in his Tahitian village, he wrote, “made me timid with their sure look, their dignity of bearing, and their pride of gait.” The one European nude he deeply admired was Manet’s Olympia, with her hauteur, her calculating gaze, her hand clamped firmly over her crotch. He kept a reproduction with him throughout his adult life, along with the books of his radical-feminist grandmother. In a diatribe on the Catholic Church, he wrote that a woman “has the right to love whomever she chooses” and “to spit in the face of anyone who oppresses her.”
One might be tempted to blame that “fat and vicious and not too smart” line from Lust for Life on the macho art ethos of mid-century writers. But on page two of Avant et après, you can read in Gauguin’s own hand, “J’aime les femmes aussi quand elles sont vicieuses et qu’elles sont grasses” (“I also like women when they’re kinky and fat”).
He might have been speaking from the heart, though his statement—as so often—has the ring of a provocation. Gauguin never outgrew the juvenile urge to scorn, shock, or just prank the elders. For his last home, he carved a horned portrait of the local monseigneur dubbed Father Lechery. And after all, contradiction was his stock-in-trade. Some pages further on in Avant et après, he observed that “precision often destroys the dream, takes all the life out of the Fable.”
It was a sloppy life, full of colliding impulses, thwarted aspirations, and scattered commitments. But in his paintings, prints, and sculptures, he could make it right—building a world where unreasonable combinations contrive to make unexpected sense and things that don’t belong nonetheless fit.
This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “How to Look at Paul Gauguin.”
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