Paul Gauguin died on 8 May 1903 in Atuona, the main village of Hiva Oa, an island in the Marquesas, a remote group of islands in the Pacific that were then a French colony and are now part of French Polynesia. He was 54. The cause usually given is heart failure after years of illness, alcohol and morphine. No doctor was there to confirm it.
He had come to Atuona in September 1901, bought a plot of land from the Catholic mission and built a two-story house and studio, which he named the Maison du Jouir, the House of Pleasure. By 1903 his eyesight was failing and he was more and more confined to his bed.
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For years, the explanation most often repeated for his illness was syphilis. No doctor on the island could have confirmed it, and none did.
In 2000, archaeologists dug out the old well just outside his house and found four badly decayed teeth, about 2.7 meters down, judged to be his.
The authors of the 2007 report on the dig judged that he had probably had syphilis. By 2014, scientists tied to the Field Museum in Chicago had matched DNA from the teeth to his grandson and found no trace of mercury, the standard treatment for syphilis in his day.
Their conclusion was careful: he probably did not have the disease, though he might have had it untreated.
The cause of death remains a guess. His last year is better documented. He was at war with the island's gendarmes, the colonial police, and with the Catholic bishop of the Marquesas, and the quarrel ended in court.
What did Gauguin take to get through the nights?
Morphine and alcohol. The National Gallery of Australia writes that he relied on both to sleep. For the pain he later turned from morphine to laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. The dig at his well also turned up morphine ampoules and a syringe, according to the 2007 report.
His body was failing in other ways. In December 1902 he could scarcely paint. From his bed he wrote Avant et après (Before and After), a memoir of his life before and after he left Europe.
His life had closed in on him before. In a letter to his friend and agent, the painter Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, he said that he had tried to end his life after finishing his huge canvas Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? in 1897-98.
Some later accounts speak of an overdose on the day he died. Nothing in the sources establishes it, and no doctor was there to say. When he died, the painting on his easel was a Breton village under snow, unsigned and undated.
What You'll Discover
How one complaint turned on him.
What was said when he died.
Who bought what he left behind.
What stands behind his grave.