Before the myth, before the searing colours of Tahiti, before the infamous incident with the ear, there was a man in a respectable suit. He worked at the Paris Bourse, the city’s stock exchange, and he was good at it. For eleven years, Paul Gauguin was a successful businessman, earning the kind of money that afforded a comfortable life, a Danish wife, five children, and a growing collection of Impressionist paintings by artists he admired. He was, by all appearances, the very picture of bourgeois stability.
This is the Gauguin we seldom speak of. It is a past that seems so violently at odds with the renegade artist who would later abandon everything for a self-imposed exile in the South Pacific. But to understand the artist, you must first understand the man who broke himself in two. The 1882 crash of the Paris stock market was the external cataclysm, the event that saw his income evaporate and his career falter. But the internal shift had been happening for years. The Sunday painter, who sought advice from Camille Pissarro, was slowly consuming the stockbroker. At the age of 35, he made a decision that was less a career change and more an act of self-immolation: he would become a painter, full time. His wife, Mette, disapproving of this reckless new path, eventually returned to her family in Denmark with their children. He had severed the final anchor to his old life.
The Hunger for Elsewhere
What followed was not a simple pursuit of art, but a desperate, lifelong search for a world he imagined existed somewhere beyond the suffocating confines of European civilisation. He was a man possessed by a thirst for the “primitive,” a concept he romanticised and chased across the globe. Brief, difficult stints in Martinique and Panama only whetted his appetite for the tropics, for a place where life, and art, could be stripped back to a raw, spiritual essence.
This quest was, in a sense, like that of a 19th-century naturalist hunting for a species believed to be extinct. The naturalist doesn’t merely want to find the creature; he wants to prove that his belief in its existence was justified all along. Gauguin wasn’t just looking for inspiration; he was seeking validation for his own internal myth – that he was, at his core, a “savage” who could only flourish when removed from the corrupting influence of the modern world.
He found his imagined Eden, or so he thought, in Tahiti. He arrived in 1891, expecting an untouched paradise, but was disappointed to find the capital, Papeete, already bearing the deep scars of French colonisation. Undeterred, he moved away from the city, determined to invent the Tahiti he had travelled so far to find. He learned to walk barefoot, letting the soles of his feet harden on the rocky ground. “Civilization is falling away from me little by little,” he wrote. It was here he produced a torrent of work, canvases that pulsed with a heat and colour the likes of which Paris had never seen.
The Human Cost of Paradise
But this paradise was built on a troubling foundation. His relationships with the local people, particularly young women, are a dark and unavoidable part of his story. He entered into relationships with girls as young as thirteen, taking them as his “wives” in a manner that reflected the era’s colonial arrogance.These girls, including Teha’amana and Pau’ura, became the subjects of his most famous paintings, their faces and bodies transformed into symbols for his own spiritual and artistic obsessions.
His was a deeply contradictory stance. He claimed to abhor colonialism and championed the local culture against the missionaries who sought to dismantle it, yet his own actions were a form of personal colonisation. He used the people and the land as raw material for his art, reimagining their lives and beliefs to fit his own narrative. The world he painted was not Tahiti as it was, but Tahiti as Gauguin needed it to be.
The Yellow House and the Severed Ear
Even before his final escape to the Pacific, Gauguin’s explosive and difficult personality had left its mark. His brief, tempestuous collaboration with Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 1888 is the stuff of legend. Van Gogh, who revered Gauguin, had dreamt of founding a “Studio of the South,” an artist’s community with Gauguin at its head.
For nine weeks, the two men lived and worked together in the Yellow House, their days fuelled by intense work and their nights by absinthe-laced debates about art. It was a clash of two fundamentally different artistic temperaments. Van Gogh painted with frantic speed, attacking the canvas as if to capture the vibrating soul of his subject; Gauguin worked slowly, methodically, painting from memory and imagination. The atmosphere grew, in Van Gogh’s words, “excessively electric.” The inevitable explosion came on December 23rd, when a violent argument culminated in Van Gogh threatening Gauguin, and later, in a fit of psychosis, mutilating his own ear. Gauguin left the next day and would never see him again.
The House of Pleasure
Gauguin’s final years were spent in an even more remote outpost: the Marquesas Islands. His health was failing, ravaged by syphilis and dependence on morphine. Yet he remained defiant. In the village of Atuona, he built a two-storey house, decorating it with his nude photographs and provocative wood carvings, including satirical sculptures of the local bishop with whom he constantly feuded. He named his home “Maison du Jouir” – the House of Pleasure.
It was here, amidst sickness and poverty, that he painted some of his most profound works, including his enormous, enigmatic masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? He painted it in 1897, shortly after learning of the death of his favourite daughter, Aline, and in the depths of a depression that led him to a failed suicide attempt. The painting is his philosophical last will and testament, a vast, mournful panorama of the cycle of life.
He died suddenly in 1903, at the age of 54. He was a man who had run from one life only to find himself trapped in another of his own making. The artistic establishment that had largely ignored him in life began to build his legend almost immediately after his death, just as his friend had predicted. He had achieved, in death, the success that had eluded him in his chaotic, desperate, and brilliant life. He remains one of art’s great, troubling figures: a stockbroker who broke the market of his own life, a seeker of paradise who created his own beautiful, flawed Eden, a genius who played at being a savage, and perhaps, in the end, convinced himself it was true.
