This biography of the French artist describes his travels, lifestyle, love affairs, and the battle with syphilis that eventually took his life.
"Everyone knows something about Paul Gauguin, but what do they really know? To many he is still the purveyor of the most seductive dream in Western art: the French stockbroker who abandoned his stultifyingly bourgeois family and career, traveling to the ends of the earth in search of a tropical Eden that he immortalized in some of the most beautiful paintings of the modern age. But there have always been other voices to challenge the myth, voices that speak of underage sex, of syphilis and colonial exploitation. Now, a hundred years after the artist's final departure from Europe, David Sweetman sets out all the evidence in a wide-ranging life that draws on a wealth of new research, to explore the sources of an art that speaks of love yet has its roots in the darker recesses of the human mind. This is a new view of Gauguin, revealing his origins in Peru in a family of anarchists and revolutionaries and examining his life with his youth placed in context. The book is set against the panoramic background of an era of rapid change, from the rise and fall of Napoleon III to the opening years of our century. At the same time, this superlative biography offers an intimate portrait of the age of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, an age brought vividly to life through a vibrant cast of characters--Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, van Gogh, Mucha, Debussy, Mallarmé, and Strindberg. Above all, it describes a life of unexpected twists and turns, moving from Gauguin's luxurious childhood in Peru, through his wartime adventures as a sailor, to his years as a financial speculator in Paris, before he plunged into art and traveled across the globe, finishing his days on a remote island in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean. At the end Paul Gauguin became a drug addict and died of syphilis only days before he was to be thrown into prison, yet his art lives after him. How it should be judged in the light of its creator's extraordinary life is the challenge offered to readers of this comprehensive biography."--Dust jacket.
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