the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt thirteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

But his heart had not killed him. He must take matters into his own hands.

‘I went into the mountains where my body would be devoured by ants. I had no revolver, but I had arsenic which I had saved up while I was so ill with eczema. Whether the dose was too strong or whether the vomiting counteracted the action of the poison, I don’t know; but after a night of terrible suffering, I returned home.’

It was the ultimate failure: he could not even manage to kill himself. Before the suicide attempt, when he had been lying in bed writing his religious testament, he had not had the strength or the will to paint, but now he felt an urgent need. Words were not enough to leave behind; he would paint his spiritual creed and confession. He gave it the title: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt twelve)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

For the first time in his life, he owned the land he lived on. It was a significant moment. This time, he would not build himself a draughty birdcage. He’d had enough of drenching rain driving in between the bamboos, enough of living beneath a plaited roof that blew away at a gust of wind when you needed it most. He commissioned a wooden house, or, rather, two houses. One for living and one for working. Consciously or not, he laid it out to resemble Rue Vercingétorix. The main house, the dwelling house, measured about nineteen metres by eight. It was raised up on metre-high piles to keep it clear of rodents and other marauding creatures, and to lift it above the waters when they rose in the rainy season. It was connected to the studio by a veranda commanding the sunset view. The walls and floor were constructed of sawn wooden planks. Wood was a very expensive material in Tahiti because most of it had to be imported from America. He had already paid 700 francs to purchase the plot. The cost of construction was so high that he had to put off paying the workmen in full.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt eleven)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

August Strindberg was still enlivening life in Rue Vercingétorix with his eccentric musical recitals and extravagant amateur theatricals that included a South Sea musical with ‘decorations’ by Gauguin and dances choreographed by the artistic director of the Folies Bergère. Strindberg was also the group’s expert on photography, a subject that had interested Gauguin since Nadar and Arosa’s pioneering collotypes. Gauguin bought a big box camera. Knowing his dislike of realist art, it is not surprising to discover that he did not use it for any serious purpose at all, certainly not in relation to his art, but simply to take jokey photographs of the bohemians dressing up and having fun. Mucha had also bought a camera, which he did use to more serious purpose, photographing the poses of models and using the photos as source material for his pictures.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt ten)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

It was a colourful party of eight that sunny breezy day in May. The artists Roderic O’Conor, Armand Séguin and Émile Jourdan brought their mistresses; Gauguin brought Annah and Taoa, her little monkey. A lovely long walk along the beach took them to the mossy bridge of roughly dressed stone connecting the mainland to the Ville Close, the medieval fortified island in the middle of the harbour. In Pont-Aven, where dressing up was a competitive game, the noisy group would not have turned a head, but in Concarneau’s stolid fishing community, exotic apparitions were not appreciated. A group of boys started following them, laughing, pointing and making rude gestures and obscene remarks. The party ignored them until a boy picked up a stone and threw it at them. Séguin went over to remonstrate; he pulled the boy’s ear. At a nearby café table a group of about fifteen men witnessed the incident. The group included the boy’s father. Rising to their feet with unmistakeable purpose, they made a rush towards the artists. The drumroll of their wooden clogs on the cobbles sent a white flurry of gulls screaming into the air. Annah’s parrot beat her wings in fear and panic. Séguin ran away from the advancing mob and jumped fully clothed into the harbour. Gauguin had not forgotten his boxing skills. With one blow he sent an attacker flying into the harbour. This was exciting. He dispatched several more into the water. And then he fell. Agony shot up his leg. It was impossible to get up. The thugs thundered towards his prone body to give him a kicking. He thought he must have fallen into a hole but in fact what had happened was that one of his assailants’ wooden clogs had shattered his shinbone and splintered several small bones in his ankle. They continued to kick him as he lay there. He put his arms up to shelter his head. All he could hear was stamping on the cobbles like pistol shots. The arrival of the gendarmes prevented Gauguin being kicked to death. He was lifted insensible on to a cart and taken back to Pont-Aven. The shinbone was sticking out of his leg through the skin. In the hospital they gave him morphine and set the leg as best they could.

He moved from the hospital to the Pension Gloanec as soon as was feasible. Through the months of August and September Gauguin lay there in bed in terrible pain, in a haze dulled by morphine. Taoa, the little monkey, cheered him; she was his playmate, companion and alter ego, and had even used to follow Gauguin into the water when he went swimming. But she ate the white flower of a yucca plant, poisonous to her kind, and she died. Soon after Taoa’s death, Annah left for Paris.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt nine)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

When, in July, Gauguin had written a letter encouraging Vincent to expect him, Vincent had spent one frenzied week in August painting the Sunflowers series for which he is so famous. Six Sunflowers, Fourteen Sunflowers, Fifteen Sunflowers. All achieved between 21 and 26 August. All for Gauguin. All composed of complementary colours. To hang in Gauguin’s room like a huge welcoming bouquet, as he wrote to Theo.

On one level, the Sunflowers are composite portraits of both men. They stand for Gauguin because they were the symbol of the Inca sun god of Peru and, following the return of the Spanish conquistadores in 1532, they had become the symbol of Peru in European iconography. But they were also a metaphorical self-portrait of Vincent himself. In Christian iconography, they hold a double significance, standing both for Christ as the light of the world, and for the questing soul that turns to the light to seek out the divine, just as the sunflower turns its head throughout the day to follow the sun on its journey through the heavens. This fused the meaning of sunflowers into a unified soul-portrait of both men.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt eight)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Vincent’s psychotic episodes and mood swings had long been a problem for his family. His ups often took the form of religious mania. His downs, depression and masochistic religious guilt. Vincent’s first ambition had been to become a clergyman like his father, but the Church had rejected him as unfit. A spell as an itinerant evangelist bringing the Gospel to coal miners in Belgium came to an end because he frightened the children, who threw things at him, while the adults thought him a fanatic and a ‘lunatic’. For a period, Vincent had managed to work at the international art-dealing firm Goupil et Cie, where his uncle, a partner, placed both Theo and Vincent until eventually Vincent’s mental problems became too great. Their despairing father decided that Vincent should be committed to an asylum. When Vincent refused, Theo had taken on responsibility for him. By 1888, he had been lodging with Theo in Paris for two years, turning his life and his apartment upside down. It came as a great relief to Theo when Vincent conceived the plan of moving to Arles. The cost of renting the Yellow House and paying a monthly allowance to both Vincent and Gauguin came cheap at the price, if it got his brother out of his hair.

During the preliminary skirmishes, Vincent had suggested to Gauguin that they exchange portraits. ‘For a long time, I’ve been touched by the fact that the Japanese artists very often exchanged works with one another. It shows that they loved and supported each other and that a degree of harmony prevailed among them; they lived precisely a sort of fraternal life, naturally, and without intrigue. The more like them we are in that respect, the better we will feel.’ An exchange of portraits would seal the brotherly bond.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt seven)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

The meeting with the Van Gogh brothers was a decisive turning point. Theo became Gauguin’s agent. He would work hard to sell Gauguin’s work over the next two years, managing to sell several ceramic pieces and eleven paintings for a total of 4,450 francs of which Gauguin received 3,315 francs. By way of comparison, Theo was selling works by Monet for an average of 2,200 francs each and Degas for an average of 3,200 francs, so it was not a fortune, but it was money, and it was coming in steadily. Theo also showed Gauguin’s paintings in the gallery he managed. In January, they caught the eye of the critic Félix Fénéon who had been the chief promoter of Seurat, with his meticulous frozen dots conveying a petrified state of monumental calm. Now he praised Gauguin for the opposite: his barbarism, irascibility and the force of his brushstrokes that fell ‘like a rainstorm’. Octave Mirbeau described his pictures as very odd, very noble and very barbaric all at once. Gauguin was seen as a new force: original, intriguing, colouristically sumptuous, and more than a little transgressive in the way he was prepared to jettison technique in order to loosen the strings of the imagination. Jaded Parisian critics, craving change from scientific analysis of colour and light, were ready for Gauguin’s dreamy suggestiveness. Fénéon picked out Conversation (Tropics) for special praise and Theo van Gogh held out for a good price for the picture. A year later he sold it for 300 francs to a collector friend of Degas, who held on to it until his death. ‘Poor Gauguin,’ Degas is supposed to have said, ‘way off there on his island. I advised him to go to New Orleans, but it was too civilised. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home.’