Gauguin was receiving an education in art despite himself. On his regular Sunday visits to Arosa’s house, surrounded by the collection he had known since a boy, it was taken for granted that, following the horrors of war, art was the supreme means of re-establishing a civilised society. Chez Arosa, the latest advances in art and photography were discussed with deep seriousness with fellow guests who often included Philippe Burty, the influential art critic of Le Figaro and the ever-stimulating Nadar. Gauguin was encouraged to go sketching, fashionably en plein air, in the company of Arosa’s younger daughter Marguerite, a red-haired, milky-skinned girl with the bloodless looks of doomed maidenhood made fashionable by Edgar Allan Poe. This made her popular as a photographic model for Nadar and her father, but Gauguin preferred to sketch beside her than to sketch her. His feelings for her were close and tender; brotherly, not erotic. Marguerite was anaemic but her character was robust. She determined to become an artist, an ambition she achieved with a degree of success in Spain and in France.
Marguerite took lessons from Camille Pissarro. Like the Arosas and the Pereires, he was of Sephardic Jewish origin. Gustave Arosa’s elder brother, Achille Arosa, had commissioned Pissarro to decorate a salon in his house at 44 Rue de Bassano. The quartet of canvases he produced, The Four Seasons, is now considered of the greatest importance as the first complete decorative scheme of Impressionist art. There must have been considerable excitement in the Arosa household in 1873 when Pissarro was producing it. That was also the year leading up to the important first Impressionist exhibition, held from April to May 1874 in Nadar’s studio, with Pissarro taking a large part in its organisation.
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