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.’
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