Amid the noisy chatter of Parisian art-circles he passed silent and unnoted. He rented a studio and began to busy himself with all sorts of experimental projects, particularly with sculpture. But very shortly his resolution and character were further tested by the new experience of hunger.
For a time he suffered extreme privation. He was forced at last to accept a salary of three francs fifty centimes a day for pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord in order to save himself from starvation.
"I have known," he wrote in a small notebook dedicated to his daughter Aline, "extreme misery, that is to say hunger and everything that follows upon hunger. It is nothing, or almost nothing. One grows accustomed to it and, with will-power, one can end by laughing at it. But what is terrible is to be prevented from working, from developing one's intellectual faculties. It is true that suffering sharpens one's ability. But it is necessary not to suffer too much or suffering will kill you.
"With a great deal of pride I have ended by having a great deal of energy, and I have forced myself to be full of will-power.
"Is pride a fault, or must one develop one's pride? I believe pride must be developed. It is the best weapon we have against the human animal that is in us."
This quotation gives us the man entirely. He was one of those who are not to be beaten, one of those who do not turn back. He was to go forward and to maintain himself while seeking a path.
In 1886 he contributed no less than nineteen pictures to an exhibition of the Impressionist group, together with a relief in wood, which seems to foreshadow the later creator of La Guerre et la Paix.
Most of these early works of Gauguin seem to have disappeared. Very few can recall seeing one. It is therefore interesting to read the following appreciation by Felix Fenéon, which shows that Gauguin was already traveling far from the formulas that satisfied the other impressionists:—
"The tones of M. Paul Gauguin's pictures are very little separated from each other; because of this, there is in his work a dull harmony. Dense trees rise from the fertile soil, abundant and humid, invade the frame, pursue the sky. The air is heavy. Bricks seen between the trunks indicate a nearby house; things are lying about, muzzles are scattered in the thicket—cows. These reds of roofs and of cattle the artist constantly opposes to his greens and reflects them again in the waters, encumbered with long grasses, which run between the tree-trunks."
This shows clearly that Gauguin was treating landscape at this period already as a synthesis, a decorative whole and not, like Manet, Pissarro or the Divisionists, as an exercise in the analysis of atmospheric vibration. As for the relief on wood, Fenéon writes: