{"id":1521,"date":"2026-05-17T14:08:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T12:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/paul-gauguin-his-art-is-admired-but-he-is-a-controversial-figure\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T22:43:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T20:43:41","slug":"paul-gauguin-his-art-is-admired-but-he-is-a-controversial-figure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/paul-gauguin-his-art-is-admired-but-he-is-a-controversial-figure\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gauguin \u2014 His Art Is Admired, but He Is a Controversial Figure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Atuona, Hiva Oa Island, Marquesas Islands, May 8, 1903.<\/strong> In a wooden hut he built himself in the heart of the village, a fifty-four-year-old man dies alone. His name is Paul Gauguin<\/strong>. He had been ravaged by syphilis for fifteen years; his left leg was ulcerated, and five years earlier he had made a failed suicide attempt using arsenic. He had just been sentenced to three months in prison for \u201cdefamation of a police sergeant,\u201d a sentence he had appealed. He would not live to serve it. <\/p>\n\n

This man leaves behind 638 paintings<\/strong>, several hundred drawings, engravings, and sculptures. He also leaves behind several Polynesian vahines<\/strong>, the youngest of whom, Marie-Rose Vaeoho<\/strong>, was sixteen at the time of his death. He leaves behind an eight-month-old daughter, Tikaomata<\/strong>. He leaves behind a body of work that, over the next twenty years, would revolutionize all of modern Western painting<\/strong> \u2014 Picasso would paint *Les Demoiselles d’Avignon*<\/em> in 1907 under the direct influence of Gauguin\u2019s primitivism; Matisse would found Fauvism based on his teachings; and the German Expressionists of *Die Br\u00fccke* would see him as their master. <\/p>\n\n

And for the past thirty years, it has sparked a lively academic debate on the relationship between art and life. In 2019, the National Gallery in London<\/strong> dedicated an entire exhibition to this question. The Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay<\/strong> is updating its exhibition labels. In 2022, the Getty Center<\/strong> is organizing a major retrospective that directly examines the relationship with Polynesian models. No French-language popular-interest article truly addresses this debate. <\/p>\n\n

This article aims to present Gauguin in both of his dimensions<\/strong>: the seminal body of work that ranks him among the greatest French artists of the 19th century, and the complex life that raises questions documented by contemporary art history. Without dramatizing. Without glossing over anything. Without judging a man who lived in a different world by today\u2019s standards. <\/p>\n\n

Childhood in Lima and Paris<\/h2>\n\n

Eug\u00e8ne Henri Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848, in Paris<\/strong>, at 56 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in the 9th arrondissement. His father, Clovis Louis Pierre Guillaume Gauguin<\/strong> (1814\u20131851), was a Republican journalist for the daily newspaper *Le National<\/em>*. His mother, Aline-Marie Chazal<\/strong> (1825\u20131867), was the daughter of Flora Tristan<\/strong> \u2014a feminist and utopian socialist, one of the leading figures of 19th-century France\u2014and the great-granddaughter of the Viceroy of Peru<\/strong>, Don Mariano de Trist\u00e1n y Moscoso. This dual heritage<\/strong>\u2014French and Spanish-Peruvian\u2014would shape Gauguin\u2019s entire life. <\/p>\n\n

In 1849<\/strong>, following Louis-Napol\u00e9on Bonaparte\u2019s coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, Clovis Gauguin\u2019s republican views forced the family into exile. They left for Peru<\/strong>, where his mother\u2019s family lived. Clovis Gauguin died during the crossing<\/strong>, off the coast of Punta Arenas (Patagonia), from a ruptured aneurysm. He was buried in Puerto del Hambre. Paul was one year old at the time. <\/p>\n\n

Aline and her two children\u2014Paul and his older sister Marie\u2014lived in Lima between 1849 and 1855<\/strong>, in the home of their maternal great-uncle, Don P\u00edo de Trist\u00e1n y Moscoso<\/strong>, a wealthy Peruvian dignitary. Gauguin would retain a defining memory<\/strong> of those six years of his childhood in Peru (from age 1 to 7): tropical colors, pre-Columbian statuettes seen in the family collections, the Spanish language, and a sense of otherness compared to France. He would say throughout his life that he was an \u201cInca\u201d<\/em> on his mother\u2019s side. <\/p>\n\n

In 1855<\/strong>, the family returned to France and settled in Orl\u00e9ans<\/strong>, the hometown of his father\u2019s family. Gauguin continued his education there at a boarding school. At the age of seventeen, in 1865, he enlisted in the merchant marine<\/strong> as a pilot\u2019s apprentice (officer\u2019s cadet). He would go<\/strong> on to travel around the world<\/strong> for six years (1865\u20131871), sailing on ships that took him to South America, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. This period shaped his love of islands<\/strong> and his passion for travel<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n

The Crash of 1882 and the Encounter with Pissarro<\/h2>\n\n

In 1871, at the age of twenty-three, Gauguin returned to France for good. Thanks to a recommendation from Gustave Arosa<\/strong>, his guardian since his mother\u2019s death in 1867 (Arosa was a banker, married to one of Aline\u2019s cousins), he began working as a stockbroker<\/strong> for the Parisian stockbroker Paul Bertin. He would remain there for eleven years<\/strong> (1872\u20131883), earning an excellent salary<\/strong> that allowed him to live a comfortable middle-class life. <\/p>\n\n

In 1873<\/strong>, at the age of twenty-five, he married Mette-Sophie Gad<\/strong>, a young Danish woman he had met in Paris. They had five children<\/strong> between 1874 and 1883: \u00c9mile, Aline, Clovis, Jean-Ren\u00e9, and Paul. The family lived in a series of Parisian apartments\u2014first on Rue La Bruy\u00e8re, then on Place Saint-Georges, and later in the Batignolles neighborhood. <\/p>\n\n

During this bourgeois period, Gauguin began painting as an amateur<\/strong>. He drew inspiration from the Impressionists he met at art salons. Around 1874, he met Camille Pissarro<\/strong>, who would become the decisive mentor<\/strong> in his career as a painter. Pissarro invited him to paint with him in Pontoise<\/strong> starting in 1879. For three years, Gauguin trained in plein air painting, the light palette, and the divided brushstroke under the patient guidance of the great painter. <\/p>\n\n

As Pissarro himself wrote to his son Lucien a few years later, and as documented in the profile of Pissarro published on Hors Cadre, Gauguin owed his fundamental technical training to Pissarro<\/strong>. Without Pissarro, Gauguin might never have left the world of finance for painting. <\/p>\n\n

Gauguin participated in the Impressionist exhibitions<\/strong>: the 5th (1880), the 6th (1881), the 7th (1882), and, most notably, the 8th exhibition in 1886<\/strong>, where he presented nineteen paintings<\/strong> \u2014the one in which Pissarro championed Seurat and the movement definitively took off.<\/p>\n\n

In January 1882<\/strong>, the financial crash of the Union G\u00e9n\u00e9rale<\/strong> shook the Paris Stock Exchange. Gauguin lost his job the following year. At thirty-five, ruined, he made an irreversible decision: to become a full-time painter<\/strong>. Mette refused to follow him in this madness. In 1884<\/strong>, the family moved to Copenhagen to live with Mette\u2019s family. Gauguin tried his hand at selling tarpaulins to make ends meet. It<\/strong> was a total failure<\/strong>. He returned alone to Paris in June 1885<\/strong>, leaving his wife and five children behind in Copenhagen. He would see Mette only once more in the next eight years\u2014briefly in 1891 before his departure for Tahiti. <\/p>\n\n

Pont-Aven and the Invention of Synthetism<\/h2>\n\n

In June 1886<\/strong>, Gauguin arrived in Pont-Aven<\/strong>, a small village in the Finist\u00e8re region of Brittany that had been home to a colony of French, American, and Scandinavian artists since the 1860s. He settled into the modest and inexpensive Gloanec boarding house<\/strong>. He stayed there until October. The first, defining trip.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Gauguin then wrote a letter to his friend \u00c9mile Schuffenecker<\/strong> that has since become famous:<\/p>\n\n

\n

\u201cI love Brittany; there I find the wild, the primitive. When my clogs echo on this granite ground, I hear the deep, muffled, and powerful sound that I seek in my painting.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

\u2014 Paul Gauguin to \u00c9mile Schuffenecker, letter from 1888, quoted in the Encyclop\u00e6dia Universalis<\/em><\/p>\n\n

This sentence is crucial to understanding Gauguin. For him, the \u201cprimitive\u201d is not a geographical reality<\/strong> (Tahiti, the Marquesas). It is a pictorial quality<\/strong> he sought even before leaving Europe<\/strong>. The \u201cprimitive\u201d is \u201cthe muted, matte, and powerful tone\u201d<\/em> \u2014dense color, firm outlines, and simplified composition. Brittany and Polynesia were stages in the same aesthetic quest<\/strong> that began in Pont-Aven in 1886. <\/p>\n\n

During his second stay in Pont-Aven in 1888<\/strong>, Gauguin met \u00c9mile Bernard<\/strong> (1868\u20131941), a twenty-year-old painter who was developing a new style he called Cloisonnism<\/strong>: flat areas of color outlined in black like medieval stained-glass windows, without gradations or shading. Gauguin adopted this technique, radicalized it, and gave it its own aesthetic coherence under the name Synthetism<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n

Synthesism is based on three principles:<\/p>\n\n