Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux; W. W. Norton, 416 pp., $39.99
In the crowded field of problematic male modernists, Paul Gauguin leads the pack. There is arguably no 19th-century painter with a lousier public approval rating. The charges against him are varied and severe. He drove Vincent van Gogh to madness, then abandoned him in Provence, severed ear and all. Years later, he pulled a similar vanishing act on his wife, trading marriage for dissolution in French Polynesia. In Tahiti and the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa, Gauguin used his colonial privilege to bed Indigenous girls of 13 and 14, leaving painted records of his conquests—to say nothing of the illegitimate children he fathered or the venereal disease he transmitted.
With such a reputation, Gauguin is not an obvious candidate for a new biography. But as Sue Prideaux contends in the opening to Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, new evidence compels us to give the artist a second look. In 2000, she writes, researchers unearthed a set of Gauguin’s teeth and determined, through chemical analysis, that he had never received treatment for syphilis. The picture of Gauguin’s misbehavior was further confused in 2020, when the original manuscript of his handwritten memoir, Avant et après, emerged from a private collection. In it, Gauguin confirms his sexual relations with Polynesian teens but also describes his efforts to undermine French colonial authorities, suggesting that he was far from quietly complicit in empire. “If the story of Gauguin as the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas was not true,” Prideaux asks, “what other myths might we be holding on to?”
In Wild Thing, she examines her subject with fresh eyes, seeking to separate truth from rumor and to take an impartial view that, as she writes, neither “condemns” nor “excuses” Gauguin’s life choices. Through lively and absorbing chapters, Prideaux charts the artist’s development from his boyhood to his death, in middle age, on Hiva Oa.
As she recounts, Gauguin came by his passion for other cultures naturally. In 1849, the year after his birth, his parents, Clovis and Aline, fled from Paris to Peru, fearing repression from the newly installed Bonapartist regime. Gauguin passed an idyllic early childhood in the Lima household of his mother’s great uncle—Aline was the daughter of French-Peruvian socialist Flora Tristan—and felt at home in “that delicious country,” as he fondly remembered it.
When Aline moved the family to Orléans, in 1855, Gauguin longed for South America. He found France dreary and identified as “a savage from Peru”—a line he repeated whenever he wanted to set himself apart from his French peers or defend his coarse manners. After high school, he escaped the continent by accepting a post in the merchant marine. He departed for Rio de Janeiro in 1865 a scrawny and sheltered adolescent and returned to Paris several journeys later a tanned and broad-shouldered young man, initiated in the ways of love thanks to one Madame Aimée, a 30-year-old French actress he met in Brazil.
To make money back on shore, he played the stock exchange and found that he had a knack for speculation. His success as a broker gave him the means to start a family: he married a Danish woman named Mette and went on to have five children. It also nourished his newfound interest in avant-garde art. He visited galleries and taught himself to sculpt and paint. He was a gifted study, and the Impressionists soon welcomed him into their circle. His Woman Sewing—an unidealized nude portrait of his family maid—was the critical sensation of the 1881 Impressionist exhibition, with Gauguin hailed as a Rembrandt for the modern era.
When the market crashed the following year, his serene existence came tumbling down with it. Gauguin was a poor saver, and with no reserves to fall back on, he and Mette teetered on the edge of destitution. Mette took her daughter and the baby Paul (known as “Pola”) to join their eldest child in Copenhagen and be near her bourgeois family. Gauguin and his middle sons, Clovis and Jean René, remained in France for a year, then followed along to Denmark, where Gauguin hoped he could start anew.
This was not to be; the painter was miserable in Copenhagen, where he could not speak the language or hold down even the most menial of jobs. In a self-portrait made during his stay in 1885, he looks grim and uncomfortable, hunched and humbled in a dark Danish attic. He returned to Paris with Mette’s blessing, taking Clovis with him. They reasoned that he had a better chance of selling his art in France, and, with many mouths to feed, Mette desperately feared another pregnancy. Until they resolved their money issues, it was safer for her to live far from her husband.
Back in France, Gauguin conferred Clovis to his well-married sister and searched for ways to live and paint on the cheap. Traveling to rural France and the colonies was appealing, not only because it satisfied his wanton curiosity for the exotic; Gauguin also hoped that relocation would lead to financial salvation. It was hard to get by in “the prodigious pyramid we call civilization,” as he wrote in a letter to Mette. In this quest, he found fellow travelers among the artists who gathered in the Breton town of Pont-Aven and in van Gogh, with whom he journeyed to Provence.
In Prideaux’s telling, van Gogh himself was to blame for the Arles episode in which he sliced off a piece of his ear. As she writes, he and his brother Theo stayed in close and warm contact with Gauguin after Arles. If those nearest to the episode never suggested that Gauguin was at fault, Prideaux convincingly asserts, then who are we to believe him guilty? Less persuasive is her characterization of the artist’s devolving marriage. Despite Prideaux’s pledge not to excuse Gauguin, a defensive tone emerges. In the relatively short period when Gauguin remained sexually faithful to Mette, Prideaux calls attention to his noble restraint. That he never again lived with his wife, and that he failed to care for Clovis (who was eventually sent back to Denmark), is written off as the result of contingency rather than choice—bad luck versus neglect. Middle-aged Gauguin wanted to be a devoted husband and father, Prideaux suggests, but was thwarted by circumstance.
In general, in the latter half of the book, Prideaux gives too much credence to Gauguin as a witness to his own life. Inhabiting his perspective is an asset when it comes to describing his evolving artistic practice in the South Seas. (She does a wonderful job imagining, for instance, how he took in the “tousle-headed” palm trees and sky “flushed lemon, pink, magenta” that he saw on his ride into Tahiti’s port.) But when it comes to his interpersonal affairs, more distance might have been helpful.
Gauguin is on the public record criticizing the French colonial government; however, we have little objective evidence for how he behaved toward his Polynesian consorts. Did his distaste for white domination extend to his sexual relationships? To answer this question, Prideaux fills the archival silences in Gauguin’s general favor. She acknowledges that we cannot know what the 13-year-old Tehamana thought of her French “husband,” then uses the threads of Gauguin’s writings to spin a tale of beautiful nights of conversation and complicity. In her old age, Pahura, another of Gauguin’s companions, described the artist as a “rascal.” From this, Prideaux infers that Pahura probably “enjoyed her time with him, too.”
Prideaux correctly points out that age gaps were common in relationships of the past. In Gauguin’s time, French girls could marry at 15, and Gauguin launched his sexual life with a woman nearly twice his age. Though one must be cautious not to apply contemporary morals to history, it is equally crucial to interpret historical experience through the lens of multiple perspectives. Wild Thing offers a rich retelling of the Gauguin story, but one that cannot entirely escape the realm of myth it sets out to avoid.
