Saga of a Stockbroker

NOBLE SAVAGE: THE LIFE OF PAUL GAUGUIN (299 pp.)--Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson--Random House ($5).

Every reader of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence knows who Eugene-Henri-Paul Gauguin was: the middle-aged Paris stockbroker who callously turned his back on business and family, fled to Tahiti and became a great painter amid the palm trees and dusky native maids. Devoted Gauguinists have damned the Maugham novel (in which the thinly disguised Gauguin is actually an Englishman named Charles Strickland) as six-pennyworth of moonshine. But they have never managed to scotch it. They never will, because the tale is essentially true.

Gauguin's latest biographers, the Hansons, are a British husband-and-wife team who have successfully sunk their teeth into some big, meaty subjects, including Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (TIME, May 19, 1952) and Chinese Gordon (TIME, May 31). Gauguin is an even tougher order, not only because he needs explaining as an artist who helped change the face of painting, but because he has become a symbol of the conflict between art and breadwinnery, artistic duty and normal social responsibility. In their fine study, the Hansons' own sympathy is with the artist, but never to a point where they try to suppress or distort the other side of the conflict.

Nudists at Tea. "I had no idea that he had a leaning toward the arts," Mme.

Gauguin used to wail, in later years--much as a lifer's wife might wail: "I had no idea he was going to Sing Sing!" Mette Gad was a Danish civil servant's daughter, a handsome, white-skinned Juno (Gauguin favored husky women) who met her fate on a jaunt to Paris in 1873. Paul Gauguin was a strapping fellow with a bull neck, a great beak of a nose, and hooded, blue-green eyes. His stockbroker's black business suit sat strangely on him because he looked like a pirate chief and walked with the rolling sway of a seaman. He had spent part of his childhood in Peru (where his mother took him to visit relatives after his journalist father died). In his teens, Paul ran away to sea and put in six years before the mast. "Oh, I was a great rascal!" he would later say, "a remarkable liar." In the early years of marriage, painting was one of several Gauguin hobbies; he also fenced and played billiards. Mette thought Paul's pictures were very pretty and perfectly respectable (at first, they were). The clash came when Paul began buying paintings by a group of eccentrics who were called Impressionists--Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir. They were then looked upon by the French art world as something like a bunch of nudists at a bishop's tea. By the time Mette had borne her third child, father Gauguin had joined the Impressionist club.

His Study of a Nude (1880) "came into being like a bolt from the blue" and shattered a tradition "established through centuries." In Study, Gauguin painted Justine, his children's nurse, "sitting [naked] on her bed mending her chemise. Her shoulders droop . . . her breasts . . . sag, her belly protrudes . . .

her flesh is a little slack." She was "a girl of our own day," wrote a lone enthusiastic critic, "neither lascivious nor simpering, who occupies herself usefully by mending her clothes." Three years after painting Study of a Nude, Gauguin came home one day with the news that he had left the stock exchange; henceforth, he told Mette, he intended to be a full-time painter. Moreover, he assured his alarmed and angry wife, he was going to make a heap of money out of art.

Echoes on Granite. It took less than two years for Painter Gauguin to become a homeless, penniless beggar.

He and Mette and the five children took refuge with Mette's family in Copenhagen. His first taste of poverty and humiliation brought out the worst in him: he once hid behind the women's bathing place at the beach and surprised a pastor's wife in the nude; another time he strolled into the drawing room wearing only a shirt. A year later, Gauguin took off for Paris with one child, leaving his wife and the other children behind. "When my sabots echo on the granite," he said, "I hear the sound, dull and strong, that I'm looking for in painting." Thanks to the generous mistress of a Breton pension, Gauguin painted in peace on a full belly. Restlessly driven back to Paris and semi-starvation, the man who had once speculated so brilliantly on the stock exchange was now looking for common stock in El Dorado.

Boundless wealth, he kept assuring Mette (who resolutely sat tight in Denmark), was just around the corner--in Tobago, for instance, where they would "have to do nothing but dig up gold with a spade and shovel." Gauguin actually got as far as Panama on their Tobago road, but the only gold he managed to dig up was the navvy's pay Gauguin got for working on the new canal. From there he pushed on to Martinique: "Paradise, after Panama," he wrote. And the women! "Pretty, my goodness! . . . They do their best to enslave me." Gauguin finally settled down in Tahiti, where he did his most dazzling work. It is almost impossible to believe that his pictures were painted by a man whose legs were corroded by eczema, and who ended up, half blind, "swinging slowly in the hammock, moaning, cursing."

"The difference between us," Gauguin once wrote his wife, "is the difference between . . . the mediocre and the creative."

Monstrous Notion. The blunt fact emerging from this biography is that not even the greatest artist has the right to tell a mother of five that she is not "creative." Although Gauguin has left posterity a host of fine paintings, he has also left it hugging the monstrous notion that (in Shaw's words) "the true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living ... if only the sacrifice of them enable him to ... paint a finer picture."

Ironically, until close to the end (at the age of 54, in 1903), Gauguin believed that he would soon be rich, that he and his wife and children would be reunited, and that he would again be the slippered Papa at the family hearth. The Walter Mittys of this world dream of becoming Paul Gauguins; they will be astonished to hear how the Gauguins dream of becoming Walter Mittys.

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