Wild Thing: a Life of Paul Gauguin

Reviewed by Gill Lowe

Sue Prideaux (Faber& Faber: 2024) 

In the first detailed biography of Paul Gauguin in 30 years Sue Prideaux re-examines his astonishing life, ‘not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth’ (xv). Recent evidence challenges the view that Gauguin was ‘the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas’ (xv). In 2000, a glass jar holding four decayed human teeth was discovered in Gauguin’s final home in the Marquesas Islands. The teeth, forensically examined by the Human Genome Project at Cambridge, were identified as Gauguin’s but had no trace of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic – the contemporary treatments for syphilis.  The second discovery in 2020 was an illuminating 213-page manuscript, Avant et Après, handwritten by Gauguin while he was suffering from increasing blindness, heart issues, eczema, an excruciatingly injured leg and morphine addiction.

This book provides the pleasure and interest of a face-paced novel. Born in Paris, Gauguin’s idyllically free early childhood was spent in Lima in the palatial home of his maternal great uncle, previous viceroy of Peru and owner of silver mines and sugar plantations. The privilege of this wealthy colonial family sits in contrast to much later years in penury. Gauguin moved to Orléans where he introduced himself as ‘a savage from Peru’ (20). The battle between civilisation and savagery becomes a recurrent motif in his life and work. Similarly he wrestles with a strong Christian faith and the appeal of other spiritual possibilities. His schooling augmented his dislike of the authority of the Catholic Church. He joined the merchant navy then relocated to Paris where, for a decade, he became a successful stockbroker, collecting Impressionist art and learning to paint with Pissarro. During this period he married Mette-Sophie Gad, an independent Danish woman, with whom he had five children. The Bourse collapsed in 1882 and the family was forced to go to Copenhagen. Gauguin worked as a tarpaulin salesman but the marriage became strained through lack of money. Returning to Paris he connected with the Symbolist-Synthetist painters.

Gauguin joined the artists’ colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany. “‘You have to remember,’ he wrote to Mette, ‘that I have two natures, the savage and the sensitive. I am putting the sensitive on hold, to enable the savage to advance, unimpeded’” (95). He later set off to make his fortune but, en route to Martinique, had to work as a labourer on the Panama Canal and became desperately ill. He spent two important creative months in Arles, with a desperate Van Gogh .  

Prideaux carefully traces Gauguin’s work as painter, sculptor, ceramicist and wood engraver, asserting that he ‘smashed the established Western canon’ (xiv). He was admired by Picasso, Manet, Matisse and Degas. His Tahiti paintings are the most controversial because they are inflected with the peripheral knowledge that Gauguin was living blissfully with Tehamana who was probably thirteen, the French and Polynesian age of consent. 

He next worked as a journalist, exposing the injustices of French colonial rule. He returned to Paris leaving Tehamana pregnant. Back in the South Seas, he fathered children with Pahura who was fourteen when they met. There are other babies and other lovers, including Juliette Huet, Annah and Vaeoho Marie-Rose. We learn of tragic early deaths too – too many to summarise adequately here. 

I urge you to discover more in this rich, fascinating, meticulously researched and crafted biography. 

Sue Prideaux will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event on the 16th of July 2026.

You can buy tickets on the SBL website here: Sue Prideaux| Suffolk Book League