He painted in Brittany, Provence, at Martinique, in the Marquesas and Tahiti.  He had parted with the Impressionists and sought for a new aesthetik of art; to achieve this he broke away not only from tradition, even the tradition of the Impressionists, but from Europe and its civilisation.  To this half-savage temperament devoured by the nostalgia of the tropics the pictures of his contemporaries bore the fatal stamp of the obvious, of the thrice done and used up.  France, Holland, Spain, Italy—­what corner was there left in these countries that had not been painted thousands of times and by great masters!  The South Seas, Japan, China—­anywhere away from the conventional studio landscape, studio models, poses, grimaces!  At Pont-Aven in 1888, between trips made to Martinique and Provence, Gauguin had attained mastery of himself; Cezanne had taught him simplicity; Degas, his avowed admirer, had shown him the potency of the line; Renoir’s warm colouring had spurred him to a still richer palette; and Manet had given him sound advice.  A copy of the Olympe, by Gauguin, finished about this time, is said to be a masterpiece.  But with Degas he was closer than the others.  A natural-born writer, his criticisms of the modern French school are pregnant with wit and just observation.  What was nicknamed the School of Pont-Aven was the outcome of Gauguin’s imperious personality.  A decorative impulse, a largeness of style, and a belief that everything in daily life should be beautiful and characteristic sent the painters to modelling, to ceramics and decoration.  Armand Seguin, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Filiger, Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Chamaillard, Verkade, O’Conor, Durio, Maufra, Ranson, Mayol, Roy, and others are to-day happy to call themselves associates of Paul Gauguin in this little movement in which the idolatry of the line and the harmonies of the arabesque were pursued with joyous fanaticism.

Gauguin in an eloquent letter tells of his intercourse with Vincent Van Gogh, who went mad and killed himself, not, however, before attempting the life of his master.  Mauclair has said of Van Gogh that he “left to the world some violent and strange works, in which Impressionism appears to have reached the limit of its audacity.  Their value lies in their naive frankness and in the undauntable determination which tried to fix without trickery the sincerest feelings.  Amid many faulty and clumsy works Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases.”  Before Gauguin went to Tahiti his Breton peasants were almost as monstrous as his later Polynesian types.  His representations of trees also seem monstrous.  His endeavour was to get beyond the other side of good and evil in art and create a new synthesis, and thus it came to pass that the ugly and the formless reign oft in his work—­the ugly and formless according to the old order of envisaging the world.