Pecheur breton gauguin biography
Paul Gauguin
French artist (–)
For the cruise ship, see Paul Gauguin (ship). For other uses, see Gauguin (disambiguation).
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (; French:[øʒɛnɑ̃ʁipɔlɡoɡɛ̃]; 7 June – 8 May ) was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements.
He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.[1][2] While only moderately successful during his lifetime, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.
Gauguin was born in Paris in , amidst the tumult of Europe's revolutionary year. In , Gauguin's family settled in Peru, where he experienced a privileged childhood that left a lasting impression on him. Later, financial struggles led them back to France, where Gauguin received formal education. Initially working as a stockbroker, Gauguin started painting in his spare time, his interest in art kindled by visits to galleries and exhibitions.
The financial crisis of significantly impacted his brokerage career, prompting a full-time shift to painting. Gauguin's art education was largely self-taught and informal, shaped significantly by his associations with other artists rather than academic training. His entry into the art world was facilitated by his acquaintance with Camille Pissarro, a leading Impressionist.
Pissarro took on a mentor role for Gauguin, introducing him to other Impressionist artists and techniques.
He exhibited with the Impressionists in the early s, but soon began developing his distinct style, characterized by a bolder use of color and less traditional subject matter. His work in Brittany and Martinique showcased his inclination towards depicting native life and landscapes.
By the s, Gauguin's art took a significant turn during his time in Tahiti, then a French colony, where he sought a refuge from the Western civilization, driven by the colonialist tropes of exoticism prevalent at the time. During that time, he controversially married three adolescent Tahitian girls with whom he later fathered children.[3] Gauguin's later years in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands were marked by health issues and financial struggles.
His paintings from that period, characterized by vivid colors and Symbolist themes, would prove highly successful among the European viewers for their exploration of the relationships between people, nature, and the spiritual world. Gauguin's art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of dealerAmbroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career and assisted in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris.[4][5] His work was influential on the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and he is well known for his relationship with Vincent and Theo van Gogh.
Biography
Family history and early life
Gauguin was born in Paris to Clovis Gauguin and Aline Chazal on 7 June , the year of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe. His father, a year-old liberal journalist from a family of entrepreneurs in Orléans,[6] was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities.
Gauguin's mother was the year-old daughter of André Chazal, an engraver, and Flora Tristan, an author and activist in early socialist movements. Their union ended when André assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder.[9]
Paul Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the illegitimate daughter of Thérèse Laisnay and Don Mariano de Tristan Moscoso.
Details of Thérèse's family background are not known; Don Mariano came from an aristocratic Spanish family from the Peruvian city of Arequipa. He was an officer of the Dragoons. Members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru.[11] Nonetheless, Don Mariano's unexpected death plunged his mistress and daughter Flora into poverty.[12] When Flora's marriage with André failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her father's Peruvian relatives.
She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune. This never materialized; but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguin's maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the revolutionary movements.
Placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in [13] Her grandson Paul "idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life".
In , Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Aline and young children in hopes of continuing his journalistic career under the auspices of his wife's South American relations.[15] He died of a heart attack en route, and Aline arrived in Peru as a widow with the month-old Paul and his 21&#;2 year-old sister, Marie.
Gauguin's mother was welcomed by her paternal granduncle, whose son-in-law, José Rufino Echenique, would shortly assume the presidency of Peru.[16] To the age of six, Paul enjoyed a privileged upbringing, attended by nursemaids and servants. He retained a vivid memory of that period of his childhood which instilled "indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life".[17][18]
Gauguin's idyllic childhood ended abruptly when his family mentors fell from political power during Peruvian civil conflicts in Aline returned to France with her children, leaving Paul with his paternal grandfather, Guillaume Gauguin, in Orléans.
Deprived by the Peruvian Tristan Moscoso clan of a generous annuity arranged by her granduncle, Aline settled in Paris to work as a dressmaker.[19]
Education and first job
After attending a couple of local schools, Gauguin was sent to the prestigious Catholic boarding school Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin.
He spent three years at the school. At the age of 14, he entered the Loriol Institute in Paris, a naval preparatory school, before returning to Orléans to take his final year at the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc. Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine. Three years later, he joined the French navy in which he served for two years.
His mother died on 7 July , but he did not learn of it for several months until a letter from his sister Marie caught up with him in India.[23]
In , Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. A close family friend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse; Gauguin was He became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for the next 11 years.
In he was earning 30, francs a year (about $, in US dollars) as a stockbroker, and as much again in his dealings in the art market.[24][25] But in the Paris stock market crashed and the art market contracted. Gauguin's earnings deteriorated sharply and he eventually decided to pursue painting full-time.
Marriage
In , he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad (–).
Over the next ten years, they had five children: Émile (–); Aline (–); Clovis (–); Jean René (–); and Paul Rollon (–). By , Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he pursued a business career as a tarpaulin salesman. It was not a success: He could not speak Danish, and the Danes did not want French tarpaulins. Mette became the chief breadwinner, giving French lessons to trainee diplomats.
His middle-class family and marriage fell apart after 11 years when Gauguin was driven to paint full-time. He returned to Paris in , after his wife and her family asked him to leave because he had renounced the values they shared.[clarification needed] Gauguin's last physical contact with them was in , and Mette eventually broke with him decisively in
First paintings
In , around the time he became a stockbroker, Gauguin began painting in his free time.
His Parisian life centered on the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Gauguin lived at 15, rue la Bruyère.[34][35] Nearby were the cafés frequented by the Impressionists. Gauguin also visited galleries frequently and purchased work by emerging artists. He formed a friendship with Camille Pissarro[36] and visited him on Sundays to paint in his garden.
Pissarro introduced him to various other artists. In Gauguin "moved downmarket and across the river to the poorer, newer, urban sprawls" of Vaugirard&#;[fr]. Here, on the third floor at 8 rue Carcel, he had his first home with a studio.[35]
His close friend Émile Schuffenecker, a former stockbroker who also aspired to become an artist, lived close by.
Gauguin showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in and (earlier, a sculpture of his son Émile had been the only sculpture in the 4th Impressionist Exhibition of ). His paintings received dismissive reviews, although several of them, such as The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, are now highly regarded.
In , the stock market crashed and the art market contracted.
Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists' primary art dealer, was especially affected by the crash, and for a period of time stopped buying pictures from painters such as Gauguin. Gauguin's earnings contracted sharply, and over the next two years he slowly formulated his plans to become a full-time artist.[36] The following two summers, he painted with Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne.
In October , he wrote to Pissarro saying that he had decided to make his living from painting at all costs and asked for his help, which Pissarro at first readily provided. The following January, Gauguin moved with his family to Rouen, where they could live more cheaply and where he thought he had discerned opportunities when visiting Pissarro there the previous summer.
However, the venture proved unsuccessful, and by the end of the year Mette and the children moved to Copenhagen, Gauguin following shortly after in November , bringing with him his art collection, which subsequently remained in Copenhagen.
Life in Copenhagen proved equally difficult, and their marriage grew strained.
At Mette's urging, supported by her family, Gauguin returned to Paris the following year.
The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, , Smith College Museum of Art
Winter Landscape, , Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Portrait of Madame Gauguin, c.
–81, Foundation E.G. Bührle, Zürich
Garden in Vaugirard (Painter's Family in the Garden in Rue Carcel), , Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
France –
After a brief period in Italy, spent in the small towns of San Salvo and Ururi, Gauguin returned to Paris in June , accompanied by his six-year-old son Clovis.
The other children remained with Mette in Copenhagen, where they had the support of family and friends while Mette herself was able to get work as a translator and French teacher. Gauguin initially found it difficult to re-enter the art world in Paris and spent his first winter back in real poverty, obliged to take a series of menial jobs.
Clovis eventually fell ill and was sent to a boarding school, Gauguin's sister Marie providing the funds.[43] During this first year, Gauguin produced very little art. He exhibited 19 paintings and a wood relief at the eighth (and last) Impressionist exhibition in May [45]
Most of these paintings were earlier work from Rouen or Copenhagen and there was nothing really novel in the few new ones, although his Baigneuses à Dieppe ("Women Bathing") introduced what was to become a recurring motif, the woman in the waves.
Nevertheless, Félix Bracquemond did purchase one of his paintings. This exhibition also established Georges Seurat as leader of the avant-garde movement in Paris. Gauguin contemptuously rejected Seurat's Neo-ImpressionistPointillist technique and later in the year broke decisively with Pissarro, who from that point on was rather antagonistic towards Gauguin.
Gauguin spent the summer of in the artist's colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany.
He was attracted in the first place because it was cheap to live there. However, he found himself an unexpected success with the young art students who flocked there in the summer. His naturally pugilistic temperament (he was both an accomplished boxer and fencer) was no impediment in the socially relaxed seaside resort.
He was remembered during that period as much for his outlandish appearance as for his art. Amongst these new associates was Charles Laval, who would accompany Gauguin the following year to Panama and Martinique.
That summer, he executed some pastel drawings of nude figures in the manner of Pissarro and those by Degas exhibited at the eighth Impressionist exhibition.
He mainly painted landscapes such as La Bergère Bretonne ("The Breton Shepherdess"), in which the figure plays a subordinate role. His Jeunes Bretons au bain ("Young Breton Boys Bathing"), introducing a theme he returned to each time he visited Pont-Aven, is clearly indebted to Degas in its design and bold use of pure colour.
The naive drawings of the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, used to illustrate a popular guide-book on Brittany, had caught the imagination of the avant-garde student artists at Pont-Aven, anxious to free themselves from the conservatism of their academies, and Gauguin consciously imitated them in his sketches of Breton girls.[50] These sketches were later worked up into paintings back in his Paris studio.
The most important of these is Four Breton Women, which shows a marked departure from his earlier Impressionist style as well as incorporating something of the naive quality of Caldecott's illustration, exaggerating features to the point of caricature.
Gauguin, along with Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Émile Schuffenecker and many others, re-visited Pont-Aven after his travels in Panama and Martinique.
The bold use of pure colour and Symbolist choice of subject matter distinguish what is now called the Pont-Aven School. Disappointed with Impressionism, Gauguin felt that traditional European painting had become too imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigour.
There was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan (Japonism). He was invited to participate in the exhibition organized by Les XX.
Women Bathing, , National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
La Bergère Bretonne, , Laing Art Gallery
Breton Girl, , Burrell Collection, Glasgow
Breton Bather, –87, Art Institute of Chicago
Cloisonnism and synthetism
Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin's work evolved towards Cloisonnism, a style given its name by the critic Édouard Dujardin to describe Émile Bernard's method of painting with flat areas of colour and bold outlines, which reminded Dujardin of the Medieval cloisonné enameling technique.
Gauguin was very appreciative of Bernard's art and of his daring with the employment of a style which suited Gauguin in his quest to express the essence of the objects in his art.[52]
In Gauguin's The Yellow Christ (), often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist work, the image was reduced to areas of pure colour separated by heavy black outlines.
Gauguin He became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for eleven years. Gauguin's naturalistic forms and "primitive" subject matter would embolden an entire, younger generation of painters to move decisively away from late Impressionism and pursue more abstract, or poetically inclined subjects, some inspired by French Symbolist poetry, others derived from myth, ancient history, and non-Western cultural traditions for motifs with which they might refer to the more spiritual and supernatural aspects of human experience. In an unsuccessful auction of Gauguin's paintings was held. This is known as a minimum price guarantee.In such works Gauguin paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of colour, thereby dispensing with the two most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. His painting later evolved towards Synthetism in which neither form nor colour predominate but each has an equal role.
Panama Canal
In , Gauguin left France along with his friend, another young painter, Charles Laval. His dream was to purchase land of his own on the small Panamanian island of Taboga, where he stated he desired to live "on fish and fruit and for nothing… without anxiety for the day or for the morrow." By the time he reached the port city of Colón, Gauguin was out of money and found work as a laborer on the French construction of the Panama Canal.
During this time, Gauguin penned letters to his wife, Mette, lamenting the arduous conditions: "I have to dig… from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening, under the tropical sun and rain," he wrote. "At night I am devoured by mosquitoes." Meanwhile, Laval had been earning money by drawing portraits of canal officials, work which Gauguin detested since only portraits done in a lewd manner would sell.[53]
Gauguin held a profound contempt for Panama, and at one point was arrested in Panama City for urinating in public.
Marched across town at gunpoint, Gauguin was ordered to pay a fine of four francs. After discovering that land on Taboga was priced far beyond reach (and after falling deathly ill on the island where he was subsequently interned in a yellow fever and malaria sanatorium),[54] he decided to leave Panama.[53]
Martinique
Later that same year, Gauguin and Laval spent the time from June to November near Saint Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony.
His thoughts and experiences during this time are recorded in his letters to his wife and his artist friend Emile Schuffenecker.[55] At the time, France had a policy of repatriation where if a citizen became broke or stranded on a French colony, the state would pay for the boat ride back. Upon leaving Panama, protected by the repatriation policy, Gauguin and Laval decided to disembark at the Martinique port of St.
Pierre. Scholars disagree on whether Gauguin intentionally or spontaneously decided to stay on the island.
At first, the 'negro hut' in which they lived suited him, and he enjoyed watching people in their daily activities.[56] However, the weather in the summer was hot and the hut leaked in the rain.
Gauguin also suffered dysentery and marsh fever. While in Martinique, he produced between 10 and 20 works (12 being the most common estimate), traveled widely and apparently came into contact with a small community of Indian immigrants; a contact that would later influence his art through the incorporation of Indian symbols.
During his stay, the writer Lafcadio Hearn was also on the island.[57] His account provides an historical comparison to accompany Gauguin's images.
Gauguin finished 11 known paintings during his stay in Martinique, many of which seem to be derived from his hut. His letters to Schuffenecker express an excitement about the exotic location and natives represented in his paintings.
Gauguin asserted that four of his paintings on the island were better than the rest.[58] The works as a whole are brightly coloured, loosely painted, outdoor figural scenes. Even though his time on the island was short, it surely was influential.
Pecheur breton gauguin biography wikipedia These works were painted during a period in which Gauguin was essentially bidding his career adieu, as if he were an athlete "at the top of his game," so to speak, but wanting to aspire towards a more spiritual condition. The Art Story. In he moved to the Marquesas Islands. Two Tahitian WomenHe recycled some of his figures and sketches in later paintings, such as the motif in Among the Mangoes,[59] which is replicated on his fans. Rural and indigenous populations remained a popular subject in Gauguin's work after he left the island.
Huttes sous les arbres, , Private collection, Washington
Bord de Mer II, , Private collection, Paris
At the Pond, , Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Conversation Tropiques (Négresses Causant), , Private collection, Dallas
Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), , Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam[59]
Vincent and Theo van Gogh
Gauguin's Martinique paintings were exhibited at his colour merchant Arsène Poitier's gallery.
There they were seen and admired by Vincent van Gogh and his art dealer brother Theo, whose firm Goupil & Cie had dealings with Portier. Theo purchased three of Gauguin's paintings for francs and arranged to have them hung at Goupil's, thus introducing Gauguin to wealthy clients. This arrangement with Goupil's continued past Theo's death in At the same time, Vincent and Gauguin became close friends (on Vincent's part it amounted to something akin to adulation) and they corresponded together on art, a correspondence that was instrumental in Gauguin formulating his philosophy of art.[60][61]
In , at Theo's instigation, Gauguin and Vincent spent nine weeks painting together at Vincent's Yellow House in Arles in the South of France.
Gauguin's relationship with Vincent proved fraught. Their relationship deteriorated and eventually Gauguin decided to leave. On the evening of 23 December , according to a much later account of Gauguin's, Vincent confronted Gauguin with a straight razor. Later the same evening, he cut off his own left ear. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and handed it to a woman who worked at a brothel Gauguin and Vincent had both visited, and asked her to "keep this object carefully, in remembrance of me".
Vincent was hospitalized the following day and Gauguin left Arles. They never saw each other again, but they continued to correspond, and in Gauguin went so far as to propose they form an artist studio in Antwerp.[63] An sculptural self-portrait Jug in the Form of a Head appears to reference Gauguin's traumatic relationship with Vincent.
Gauguin later claimed to have been instrumental in influencing Vincent van Gogh's development as a painter at Arles. While Vincent did briefly experiment with Gauguin's theory of "painting from the imagination" in paintings such as Memory of the Garden at Etten, it did not suit him and he quickly returned to painting from nature.[65]
Edgar Degas
Although Gauguin made some of his early strides in the world of art under Pissarro, Edgar Degas was Gauguin's most admired contemporary artist and a great influence on his work from the beginning, with his figures and interiors as well as a carved and painted medallion of singer Valérie Roumi.
He had a deep reverence for Degas' artistic dignity and tact. It was Gauguin's healthiest, longest-lasting friendship, spanning his entire artistic career until his death.
In addition to being one of his earliest supporters, including buying Gauguin's work and persuading dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to do the same, there was never a public support for Gauguin more unwavering than from Degas.
Gauguin also purchased work from Degas in the early to mids and his own monotyping predilection was probably influenced by Degas' advancements in the medium.[69]
Gauguin's Durand-Ruel exhibition in November , which Degas chiefly organized, received mixed reviews.
Among the mocking were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and former friend Pissarro. Degas, however, praised his work, purchasing Te faaturuma&#;[es] and admiring the exotic sumptuousness of Gauguin's conjured folklore.[71][72] In appreciation, Gauguin presented Degas with The Moon and the Earth, one of the exhibited paintings that had attracted the most hostile criticism.[73] Gauguin's late canvas Riders on the Beach (two versions) recalls Degas' horse pictures that he started in the s, specifically Racetrack and Before the Race, testifying to his enduring effect on Gauguin.
Degas later purchased two paintings at Gauguin's auction to raise funds for his final trip to Tahiti. These were Vahine no te vi (Woman with a Mango) and the version Gauguin painted of Édouard Manet's Olympia.[73][75]
First visit to Tahiti
By , Gauguin had conceived the project of making Tahiti his next artistic destination.
Van gogh biography: They did not get along and Gauguin returned to Paris. Toggle navigation. Paul Gauguin's last physical contact with them was in He was known to have had trysts with several prepubescent native girls, some of whom appear as subjects of his paintings.
A successful auction of paintings in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in February , along with other events such as a banquet and a benefit concert, provided the necessary funds. The auction had been greatly helped by a flattering review from Octave Mirbeau, courted by Gauguin through Camille Pissarro. After visiting his wife and children in Copenhagen, for what turned out to be the last time, Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on 1 April , promising to return a rich man and make a fresh start.
His avowed intent was to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional".[79][80] Nevertheless, he took care to take with him a collection of visual stimuli in the form of photographs, drawings and prints.[a]
He spent the first three months in Papeete, the capital of the colony and already much influenced by French and European culture.
His biographer Belinda Thomson observes that he must have been disappointed in his vision of a primitive idyll. He was unable to afford the pleasure-seeking life-style in Papeete, and an early attempt at a portrait, Suzanne Bambridge, was not well liked. He decided to set up his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, some 45 kilometres (28&#;mi) from Papeete, installing himself in a native-style bamboo hut.
Here he executed paintings depicting Tahitian life such as Fatata te Miti (By the Sea) and Ia Orana Maria (Ave Maria), the latter to become his most prized Tahitian painting.[84]
Many of his finest paintings date from this period. His first portrait of a Tahitian model is thought to be Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower).
Pecheur breton gauguin biography Early Training. In the family left Paris for that country, motivated by the political climate of the period. In his final decade, Gauguin lived in Tahiti, and subsequently Punaauia, finally making his way to the Marquesas Islands. Overview, Artworks, and Biography.The painting is notable for the care with which it delineates Polynesian features. He sent the painting to his patron George-Daniel de Monfreid, a friend of Schuffenecker, who was to become Gauguin's devoted champion in Tahiti. By late summer this painting was being displayed at Goupil's gallery in Paris. Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews believes that Gauguin's encounter with exotic sensuality in Tahiti, so evident in the painting, was by far the most important aspect of his sojourn there.
Pecheur breton gauguin biography death Gauguin's naturalistic forms and "primitive" subject matter would embolden an entire, younger generation of painters to move decisively away from late Impressionism and pursue more abstract, or poetically inclined subjects, some inspired by French Symbolist poetry, others derived from myth, ancient history, and non-Western cultural traditions for motifs with which they might refer to the more spiritual and supernatural aspects of human experience. Simple wooden fishing boats float on the surface of the water, which is alive with ripples and reflections—the impressions of the colors, shadows and shapes of the landscape flanking the river. His body had been weakened by alcohol and a dissipated life. At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine to fulfill his required military service.He often rendered titles of his works in Tahitian, although some of these titles were misconjugated to a point where they were hard to understand by native Tahitian speakers themselves.[87]
Gauguin was lent copies of Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's&#;[fr] Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan and Edmond de Bovis'&#;[fr] État de la société tahitienne à l'arrivée des Européens, containing full accounts of Tahiti's forgotten culture and religion.
Gauguin was fascinated by the accounts of Arioi society and their god 'Oro. Because these accounts contained no illustrations and the Tahitian models had in any case long disappeared, he could give free rein to his imagination. He executed some twenty paintings and a dozen woodcarvings over the next year. The first of these was Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), representing Oro's terrestrial wife Vairaumati, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
His illustrated notebook of the time, Ancien Culte Mahorie&#;[it], is preserved in the Louvre and was published in facsimile form in
In all, Gauguin sent nine of his paintings to Monfreid in Paris. These were eventually exhibited in Copenhagen in a joint exhibition with the late Vincent van Gogh. Reports that they had been well received (though in fact only two of the Tahitian paintings were sold and his earlier paintings were unfavourably compared with van Gogh's) were sufficiently encouraging for Gauguin to contemplate returning with some seventy others he had completed.
He had in any case largely run out of funds, depending on a state grant for a free passage home. In addition he had some health problems diagnosed as heart problems by the local doctor, which Mathews suggests may have been the early signs of cardiovascular syphilis.
Gauguin later wrote a travelogue (first published ) titled Noa Noa&#;[ca], originally conceived as commentary on his paintings and describing his experiences in Tahiti.
Modern critics have suggested that the contents of the book were in part fantasized and plagiarized.[94][95] In it he revealed that he had at this time taken a year-old girl as native wife or vahine (the Tahitian word for "woman"), a marriage contracted in the course of a single afternoon. This was Teha'amana, called Tehura in the travelogue, who was pregnant by him by the end of summer [97][98] Teha'amana was the subject of several of Gauguin's paintings, including Merahi metua no Tehamana and the celebrated Spirit of the Dead Watching, as well as a notable woodcarving Tehura now in the Musée d'Orsay.[] By the end of July , Gauguin had decided to leave Tahiti and he would never see Teha'amana or their child again even after returning to the island several years later.
A digital catalogue raisonné of the paintings from this period was released by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute in []
Page from Gauguin's notebook (date unknown), Ancien Culte Mahorie. Louvre
Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), , Museum of Modern Art
Spirit of the Dead Watching , Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Tehura (Teha'amana), –3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Return to France
In August , Gauguin returned to France, where he continued to execute paintings on Tahitian subjects such as Mahana no atua (Day of the God) and Nave nave moe (Sacred spring, sweet dreams).[] An exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in November was a moderate success, selling at quite elevated prices 11 of the 40 paintings exhibited.
He set up an apartment at 6 rue Vercingétorix, on the edge of the Montparnasse district frequented by artists, and began to conduct a weekly salon. He affected an exotic persona, dressing in Polynesian costume, and conducted a public affair with a young woman still in her teens, "half Indian, half Malayan", known as Annah the Javanese&#;[ca].[]
Despite the moderate success of his November exhibition, he subsequently lost Durand-Ruel's patronage in circumstances that are not clear.
Mathews characterises this as a tragedy for Gauguin's career. Amongst other things he lost the chance of an introduction to the American market.[] The start of found him preparing woodcuts using an experimental technique for his proposed travelogue Noa Noa. He returned to Pont-Aven for the summer. In February he attempted an auction of his paintings at Hôtel Drouot in Paris, similar to the one of , but this was not a success.
The dealer Ambroise Vollard, however, showed his paintings at his gallery in March , but they unfortunately did not come to terms at that date.
He submitted a large ceramic sculpture he called Oviri he had fired the previous winter to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts salon opening in April.[] There are conflicting versions of how it was received: his biographer and Noa Noa collaborator, the Symbolist poet Charles Morice&#;[fr], contended () that the work was "literally expelled" from the exhibition, while Vollard said () that the work was admitted only when Chaplet threatened to withdraw all his own work.[] In any case, Gauguin took the opportunity to increase his public exposure by writing an outraged letter on the state of modern ceramics to Le Soir.
By this time it had become clear that he and his wife Mette were irrevocably separated.
Although there had been hopes of a reconciliation, they had quickly quarrelled over money matters and neither visited the other. Gauguin initially refused to share any part of a 13,franc inheritance from his uncle Isidore which he had come into shortly after returning. Mette was eventually gifted 1, francs, but she was outraged and from that point on kept in contact with him only through Schuffenecker—doubly galling for Gauguin, as his friend thus knew the true extent of his betrayal.
By mid attempts to raise funds for Gauguin's return to Tahiti had failed, and he began accepting charity from friends.
In June Eugène Carrière arranged a cheap passage back to Tahiti, and Gauguin never saw Europe again.[]
Nave nave moe (Sacred spring, sweet dreams), , Hermitage Museum
Annah the Javanese, (), Private collection[]
Paul Gauguin, Alfons Mucha, Luděk Marold, and Annah the Javanese at Mucha's studio,
Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful Land), woodcut in Noa Noa series, , Art Gallery of Ontario