His personal characteristics were unfavorably judged by most of those with whom he came in contact. It must be remembered, however, that he was by nature reserved and even suspicious, as are many people of fundamental genius. He differed from those about him in that he worked by instinct, while they worked according to some conscious method. He therefore obtained out of himself, by means of slow thinking and laborious effort, the knowledge which many have at the beginning. Further, the study and practice of art is in itself so exhausting of physical and emotional fibre as to leave its possessor with little reserve of tact and dissimulation with which to face the world. Finally, Gauguin was shy, actually and by nature shy. People took this shyness for rudeness and this reserve for disdain. And Gauguin was not always unwilling to profit by this misunderstanding. He carefully cultivated his rudeness, both to create an effect and to keep bores at a distance.
As regards his work, he was on the way to find his path, although he never entirely found it, even to the end of his career. His versatility prevented his art from ever becoming fixed and dead, like that of many popular and highly successful painters.
Mention has already been made of his appearance in 1880 among the Impressionists and of the praise bestowed by Huysmans on one of his pictures for its frank realism. This very nude, however, shows Gauguin massing his shadows, making them heavy and dark, which was the direct contrary to Impressionist practice. A year later we find Huysmans complaining of the low and muddy color of his pictures; another proof that the painter was already trying to mass tones, to escape from the division of tones employed by the Impressionist group.
We are safe in assuming also that Gauguin felt already an inward desire to paint nature as he had seen her in the tropics. His early years had shown him the tropics; and the art of the greatest masters, as well as of the worst daubers, is based on the instinctive knowledge they have obtained during childhood and the use they have made of it in later years. Pissarro, too, had seen the tropics; but they had not in any way influenced his color sense, which, indeed, grew colder and grayer as his years advanced. But he may have had something to do with Gauguin's inclination towards tropical subjects, though the feeling of kinship with Nature which Gauguin brought to such subjects was all his own.
If Gauguin had but known it, there waited for him not the future of fame and fortune of which he dreamed, but seventeen years of life-and-death struggle with actual hunger in a world that gave him neither the means of living nor the slightest encouragement, but only hampered him in every way, so that he was forced to paint his finest decorative pictures on small pieces of board or canvas instead of on great walls. He was to quit his own country, and to go to the ends of the earth, only to find that the system of civilization possessed by his country, whatever its other advantages, did not permit of an artist to live and enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was finally to sink into an unmarked grave, to be almost forgotten, and to attain to a commercial apotheosis only when no longer able to profit by it. Even if Gauguin could have realized this, it is doubtful if he would have changed his mind. Ready to dare everything, he strode forward into the future.
PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889
I
With the return of Gauguin to Paris there opened for him the second stage of his career, the struggle to maintain himself on the productions of his brush and chisel. During the first stage his character had been formed by the hard experiences of seafaring and by the comparative leisure and affluence of his epoch of splendor, during which he found time to discuss the principles of art with the best exponents of the latest French tradition. He had not only met and talked with men like Manet, Pissarro, and Cézanne, he also visited the museums of Paris, and did not confine himself to the Louvre, but made a special study of the Musée Guimet with its collection of art works from the far East, and later of the Trocadero, with its casts of Cambodian sculpture. His stay at Bertin's had been of good service in giving him the mental equipment, the self-education necessary to begin the struggle for artistic independence.
Yet in his case we know far less of what passed in his mind during these important years of development than in the case of most of his contemporaries. "He was the sort of man to be awake to everything new in art that was going on," says one who knew him in this period, "but not to acknowledge indebtedness to anything or anybody." What he absorbed was by instinct; and instinct cautioned him not to share his knowledge with people who might fail to make good use of it.