Paul Gauguin was a French painter, born in Paris in 1848 and dead in the Marquesas Islands in 1903. A stockbroker who quit the stock exchange to paint, he flattened color into bold, outlined shapes, lived nine weeks with Van Gogh in Arles, and sailed for Tahiti in 1891. People know him for his Tahitian paintings and for the night Van Gogh cut his ear.
The canvas that sums him up was meant to be his last act. He painted it in Tahiti, at the end of 1897, and the story behind it is not quite the one the legend tells.
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By the end of 1897 Gauguin was sick, in debt and living in Tahiti for the second time, and a letter had just told him that his daughter had died in Copenhagen. He began a canvas as long as a wall and filled it with figures: a sleeping baby on the right, adults in the middle, an old woman on the left, a blue idol behind them. In the corner he wrote the title in three plain lines, with no question mark.
When it was done he told his friend Daniel de Monfreid that he had tried to kill himself with arsenic. He survived and kept painting until 1903. The dealer Ambroise Vollard showed the picture in Paris in 1898, and today it hangs in Boston.
Yet the old gods in that picture were not waiting for him when he landed in 1891. He arrived horrified at how little of Tahiti's own religion had survived French rule, and he learned much of what he painted from a book published in 1837. The ancestral world on the canvas was partly read, and partly invented.
What You'll Discover
Why a stockbroker walked out.
Why the ground is red.
What happened in the yellow house.
What Tahiti gave him instead.
Who the girl in the dark was.
How his last years ended.