Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 1

Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art.

by John Gould Fletcher.

PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885

About the middle of the last century, there occurred in Paris a series of events which seemed at the time likely to be of importance to future history, secondary only to the days of the French Revolution. You will seek Paris in vain for any public monument to these events, known as the Revolution of 1848. Only the name of the hideously utilitarian Boulevard Raspail may perhaps remind you, that in this year France achieved another one of those political failures which have been so curiously common in her history since 1789.

In February of that year, King Louis Philippe and his ministers had fled before the rising storm of popular feeling. It seemed at last that the great popular revolution of the working cla.s.ses, dreamed of by every artist since 1789, proclaimed in the Rabelaisian caricatures of Daumier, latent in the troubled Romanticism of the epoch, was at hand. A provisional republic was formed and elections were held to the National a.s.sembly. But the provinces showed that it mattered little to them whether the form of Government was changed or not. So long as the peasant had his farm, his cow, his money safely stowed away in a stocking, a hard-working wife, a pipe and a gla.s.s of wine, he was content with things as they were. If the industrial cla.s.ses of Paris were starving, that was not his affair. He shared none of their fanatic Socialism, none of their dreams of the millennium. He wanted to be left alone.

The National a.s.sembly proved to be overwhelmingly moderate, and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the Parisian extremists. But the latter were not to be beaten without a struggle. On the fifteenth of May, a mob attempted to take the a.s.sembly by storm, and failed. On the eighteenth, Lamartine, the former idol of the Revolutionaries, was hooted down while making a conciliatory speech. The Government found that it must either provide work and wages for the Parisian unemployed or run the risk of an appeal to force. A scheme was started, but it proved to be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its project. Three days later the storm broke. Two hundred and twenty-one barricades arose as if by magic in the streets, crowned with red flags and manned by sixty thousand men. For three days the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade fell, the blood was washed off the pavements, the cause of "moderation" and "good sense"

was restored.

There is a poetic justice in the coincidence of some events. On the seventh of June a son, Paul, was born to M. and Madame Gauguin, residing in Paris. This infant, brought obscurely into the world to the sound of cannon, was destined by one of the ironic dispensations of Nature to become later the leader of an art-revolution as far reaching and as important in its effects as the great attempt of 1848. His life was to be a constant struggle with the growing bourgeois civilization, the middle-cla.s.s morality, of the late nineteenth century; his art was to speak the promise of a renewed world, a world where man could again walk naked, unashamed and free, as in Eden. He was destined to break beneath the inert weight of social conventions and stupidities, as the revolution had been broken by the armed forces at the disposal of the government: but his ideas were to point the way to, new conceptions of art and of life, which only the future can realize.

Clovis Paul Gauguin, to give the father his full name, was a petty journalist from Orleans. He had a post as collaborator on one of the obscure newspapers of Liberal opinion, that so greatly flourished about this time. His influence upon his son was slight, as is the case with the fathers of most artists. It is to Madame Gauguin that we must turn for an explanation of the character of her famous son.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait of Gauguin's mother.]

Aline Marie Gauguin was the daughter of a certain Chazal, of whom we know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist pamphleteer and agitator, Flora Tristan.

Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru. Her father was a Spaniard of n.o.ble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso. He served as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the wars of independence which severed Peru from Spain, since we find him and his family later occupying positions of dignity and affluence under the Republic. In 1818 he sent his daughter to school in Paris. She eloped the next year with Chazal and was disowned by her parents. After the birth of her child she separated from her husband and returned to Peru, seeking a reconciliation with her family. But the family had determined to do nothing for the self-willed, impulsive daughter, and she drifted back to Paris, where she attempted to support herself by writing pamphlets of strongly Socialistic tendencies. She became a pioneer of woman's suffrage, of humanitarianism, of the trade-union movement. She toured France making speeches. In 1836 she had the misfortune to meet Chazal again in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the offense. A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-unions, remembering her zeal for their cause and her personal beauty--which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of her speeches--subscribed the sum necessary to put up a monument.

Such were the parents and the grand-parents of the child who had just been born into the world. The tragic and violent union of Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist he later became.

In Chazal we find the source of his violence and headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of moral restraint, his scorn of the bourgeoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicism. Half-savage Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab, Celt and African.

Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even other currents--currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had subdued but not conquered.

Whatever else destiny held in store for him, it was certain from the beginning that Paul Gauguin could never be wholly a.s.similated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous and fickle city of Paris.

II

The earliest adventures of the future painter combined the peculiar strands of tragedy, romance and savagery which were to recur so often in his later life. In December, 1851, the makeshift Republic came to an end and Louis Napoleon, by an easy _coup d'etat_, restored the Empire.

Clovis Gauguin found himself ruined with the suspension of the Liberal paper for which he wrote. There was only one hope remaining: that Flora Tristan's relations in Lima might do something for Paul and his sister Marie. So the family set out for Peru. On the way, during the terrible pa.s.sage through the Straits of Magellan, Clovis Gauguin was seized with heart failure and died. His body was taken ash.o.r.e and buried at Port Famine, or Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in the world, in Chile.

The mother and her two orphaned children were received with kindness by the head of the family, Flora Tristan's uncle, Don Pio Tristan y Moscoso. Concerning this personage Gauguin himself told many anecdotes in later years. Probably most of these were inexact to the point of being fable pure and simple. We must remember that Gauguin at this time was scarcely four years of age. We know that the family were wealthy n.o.bles, of high social standing, who lived in the old Castillian manner of luxury and indolence. From such surroundings Gauguin doubtless derived much of the "hidalgo manner" that distinguished him throughout life--a blend of haughtiness, reserve and egoism, masking often a real shyness before people. And here he saw, also for the first time, works of art produced by a non-European civilization: ceramics, jewelry, fabrics of Inca origin. The remembrance of these specimens of savage, primitive art undoubtedly influenced his mind in later years.

Gauguin's stay in Lima did not last long. Four years later his paternal grandfather died in France, and his mother returned to that country in order to obtain her share of his estate, which proved to be only a small sum.

In later years, the painter believed, or affected to believe, that if his mother had remained in Peru and had neglected her relations in France she would have been left heiress to Don Pio Tristan's property.

It is probable that Gauguin was here merely romancing, as he often did, when desiring to mystify and startle people about his life. It is an enchanting but fruitless speculation to wonder what course the boy's mind might have taken had it been subjected for a few more years to the influence of Peruvian life. Peru undoubtedly gave him a love for the tropics, for exotic, out-of-the-way, old-fashioned places, unspoiled by the nineteenth century. Unconsciously many of the traits that made his character so little comprehensible to the Frenchmen of his day were planted in him during these years.

France was now to give him something different. He was to be educated, or rather to receive what pa.s.sed for an education. He remained at a seminary at Orleans till the age of seventeen, hating his studies, becoming more and more intractable and unteachable. This seminary, as all such inst.i.tutions in France at the time, was conducted by Jesuit priests.

In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years that he had spent at the seminary were a hatred of hypocrisy, false virtue and spying. And with malicious irony he said: "And I also learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force not to be despised in the struggle with other people."

His sole ambition was to escape, to get to sea again, to make voyages to the tropics. His mother dreamed of placing him as a cadet in the navy, but he ignominiously failed to pa.s.s the necessary examination. He was therefore placed in the merchant marine. This decision of his mother he regretted bitterly to the end of his life.

In 1865 he embarked aboard the _Luzitano_, a cargo boat, on a voyage from Havre to Rio de Janeiro. His grade aboard this ship was that of a pilot's apprentice.

Of this voyage, which enabled him to see again the tropics, Gauguin retained in later years important memories.

In the fragmentary note-books he kept in Tahiti he declared that it was during this voyage that he heard from the lips of a ship-mate a story of the latter's life when ship-wrecked among the natives of the Society Islands in the Pacific. The remembrance of that story may have influenced him later in his choice of Tahiti as an ideal residence. At least the appearance of Rio de Janeiro's harbor awakened in his mind fresh enthusiasm for the tropics. The stay at Rio was further signalized by a liaison with an actress, of that eminently casual kind which Gauguin was to experience so often later on. Finally the return voyage brought about another liaison, this time with a Prussian woman, and in defiance of ship's discipline. It was certain that his character--was not of the sort that could be fitted easily into the mold of self-restraint necessary to produce a capable naval officer. At all events, the next thing we hear is that Gauguin quitted the merchant service and enlisted in the French Navy as a common sailor, in February, 1868. Probably by this time his mother had refused to support him, and he was forced into this position through necessity.

The cruiser _Jerome Napoleon_, on which he found himself, was, to his chagrin, ordered to cruise in northern waters. So instead of seeing the tropics again, Gauguin's new experiences were only of the ice-bound Greenland coast and the barren North Cape. This was bad, but still worse was to follow. The vessel was on its way to Spitzbergen when news was brought to its captain that France had declared war upon Prussia.

"Where are you going?" said the second officer, seeing the Captain put the helm about.

"To Charenton," replied the indignant first officer; Charenton being the great lunatic asylum near Paris!

The vessel got no nearer to France than Copenhagen, when the melancholy news of Sedan came. The name _Jerome Napoleon_ was painted out, that of _Desaix_ subst.i.tuted, and the unfortunate cruiser was obliged to remain in the waters off Copenhagen till the close of the war in 1871, contenting herself with the capture of one small ship as prize.

III

In 1871, after the cessation of hostilities, Gauguin obtained leave, renewable at the end of eighteen months, to quit the navy. He was now heartily sick of the sea, because of the enforced idleness and wearisome discipline that he had now endured aboard the _Desaix_ for three years.

Besides the opportunity of another career was offering itself and he felt that he must seize it.

His mother had died in the interval since he had last seen France and, in dying, had confided the care of her two children to a well-to-do Paris banker, Gustave Arosa. This man immediately found for Paul a place at Bertin's, a banking house with which he was connected. And now there opened for the young man a period not only the most prosperous but in retrospect the most amazing of his career.

Though his character had already displayed itself to be that of an instinctive nomad, a lover of the tropics and essentially a pagan savage, yet it is apparent that he now yielded readily to the entrancing prospect of ama.s.sing a fortune by speculation on the Bourse, without troubling himself too much with the question whether his new position might not entail heavier responsibilities in the future. He had not been long at Bertin's before he found out how to make money quite easily.

Possibly this was not a very difficult thing to do, for the Paris stock market had been utterly disorganized by the events of 1870-71, and, now that peace was signed, France was making one of those rapid recoveries that have been so common in her history. Stocks were going up and trade was booming. Gauguin was able to take advantage of these circ.u.mstances to such an extent that in one year, we are told, he made as much as forty thousand francs.

In 1873 he married, thus saddling himself with a responsibility he was never wholly to shake off. His wife, Mette Sophia Gad, was the daughter of a Protestant clergyman of Copenhagen. The family was a good one and enjoyed an honorable position in the society of the Danish capital. The daughters had been educated at Paris, and one of them had married a member of the Norwegian Parliament, while another had become the first wife of the painter, Fritz Thaulow.

When or where Gauguin first met his future bride is uncertain, but it was probably during the stay of the _Desaix_ at Copenhagen. At any rate it seems that he was eager to marry, as the ceremony (a purely civil one, owing to his wife being a Protestant) was delayed owing to the loss of his father's certificate of birth in the bombardment of St. Cloud.

At this time, through his wife's friends and connections, through Gustave Arosa, through Emile Schuffenecker--a fellow employee at Bertin's--and through others, a new interest came into his life. He began to paint, although pressure of work did not permit him to regard this fresh occupation as more than an amus.e.m.e.nt at first. Arosa was, in his way, an amateur of art and had collected a number of pictures by French artists of the day--among them Delacroix and Courbet. These works he engraved in photogravure--an art then in its infancy--and sent copies of the engravings to his personal friends. Through Schuffenecker Gauguin was brought closely into touch with the Impressionists, who were then making a sensation in Paris. Gauguin bought brushes and colors and began by painting on Sundays and holidays. It was only slowly that he began to look upon painting as anything but a distraction.

His first essays in art were purely academic. He painted in the prevailing style of the Salons and even sent one picture to the Salon of 1876. At the same time he began to attempt sculpture. He worked at first in marble, a material afterwards entirely rejected in favor of the more coa.r.s.ely-grained surface of wood, clay or paste. He liked a rough surface and counseled young sculptors to mix sand with the clay in order to emphasize this roughness.

Gauguin's was a many-sided and a versatile nature. His early years at sea had given him much of the sailor's ingenuity. He had a tremendous interest in the technical processes of art. During his life he was able to do almost equally well at painting, lithography and sculpture. He also attempted etching, stained gla.s.s and pottery. His writings, particularly his share in "Noa Noa," show a considerable grasp of direct, poetic narrative--a gift that might very possibly have made of him a good poet. Throughout his life we are unable to regard him solely as a painter of pictures; his influence in opening new channels for art-decoration is even more important than his pictorial work. Even in literature his achievements have a certain force as inspiration. The problems he set himself were as varied in their way as those that occupied his English contemporary, William Morris, almost as varied as those that occupied Leonardo da Vinci.

He acquired knowledge easily; his problem was always how to weigh, sift and make use of it. But his growth to artistic maturity was slower than in the case of artists who limit their field of effort, because he attacked many subjects at the same time.

It may seem strange to consider this many-sided versatility as a proof, not of a complex, but of a primitive nature. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The painter Schuffenecker and his family.]

All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism.

To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the ancestry of the movement.

Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism--or to speak better, Naturalism--carried out in painting. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism intended and why it failed.

A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead.