PAUL GAUGUIN
His Life and Art
BY
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS
NICHOLAS L. BROWN
NEW YORK
MCMXXI
TO
M.T.H.S.
WHO HELPED ME WITH
ADVICE AND CRITICISM
"Improvement makes straight roads;but the crooked roads without improvementare 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
I
About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a seriesof events which seemed at the time likely to be of importance to futurehistory, secondary only to the days of the French Revolution. You willseek Paris in vain for any public monument to these events, known as theRevolution of 1848. Only the name of the hideously utilitarian BoulevardRaspail may perhaps remind you, that in this year France achievedanother one of those political failures which have been so curiouslycommon in her history since 1789.
In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had fledbefore the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that thegreat popular revolution of the working classes, dreamed of by everyartist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures of Daumier,latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was at hand. Aprovisional republic was formed and elections were held to the NationalAssembly. But the provinces showed that it mattered little to themwhether the form of Government was changed or not. So long as thepeasant had his farm, his cow, his money safely stowed away in astocking, a hard-working wife, a pipe and a glass of wine, he wascontent with things as they were. If the industrial classes of Pariswere starving, that was not his affair. He shared none of their fanaticSocialism, none of their dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be leftalone.
The National Assembly prov