In 1891 and 1892, at Tahiti, Gauguin painted many pictures—­masterpieces his friends and disciples call them—­which were later shown at an exhibition held in the Durand-Ruel Galleries.  Paris shuddered or went into ecstasy over these blazing transcriptions of the tropics; over these massive men and women, nude savages who stared with such sinister magnetism from the frames.  The violent deformations, the intensity of vision, the explosive hues—­a novel gamut of rich tones—­and the strangeness of the subject-matter caused a nine days’ gossip; yet the exhibition was not a great success.  Gauguin was too new, too startling, too original for his generation; he is yet for the majority, though he may be the Paint God of the twentieth century.  Cut to the heart by his failure to make a dazzling reputation, also make a little money—­for he was always a poor man—­he left Paris forever in 1895.  He was sick and his life among the Marquisians did not improve his health.  He took the part of the natives against the whites and was denounced as a moral castaway.  In 1904 he wrote Charles Morice:  “I am a savage.”  But a savage of talent.  In reality he was a cultivated man, an attractive man, and a billiard player and a fencer.  Paint was his passion.  If you live by the pen you may perish by the pen.  The same is too often the case with the palette and brush hero.

Though Paul Gauguin failed in his search for a synthesis of the ugly and the beautiful, he was nevertheless a bold initiator, one who shipwrecked himself in his efforts to fully express his art.  With all his realism he was a symbolist, a master of decoration.  A not too sympathetic commentator has written of him:  “Paul Gauguin’s robust talent found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of colour spots may be found employed with delicacy and placed at the service of a rather heavy but very interesting harmony.  Then the artist spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely transformed manner.  He brought back from those regions some landscapes treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild fashion.  The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas that has the texture of tapestry.  Many of these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multicoloured, crude, and barbarous imagery.  Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the lovely values, the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism.  On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a beautiful, artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosity, has perhaps not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if exaggerated, may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is as dangerous as false knowledge.”

All of which is true; yet Paul Gauguin was a painter who had something new to say, and he said it in a very personal fashion.

II — TOULOUSE-LAUTREC