Struggle of Jacob with the Angel.
His first stay in Pont-Aven was destined to be short. It is chiefly remarkable for the fact that here he was visited by Emile Bernard, then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with Gauguin and other painters afford matter for so much controversy that they must be examined in detail.
Bernard was the type of infant phenomenon that springs up, mushroom-like, in an overheated atmosphere of artistic and literary controversy. At the age of sixteen he was writing violently naturalistic and extremely bad poetry. He next went in for painting, raced off to Brittany to see Gauguin, was received with coolness, ran back to Paris. Here he found Van Gogh fresh from Holland and, when Van Gogh in turn went to Arles, became his most industrious correspondent. Later he heard that the crazy old hermit, Paul Cézanne, was living at Aix—so off to Aix went Bernard. More letters were the outcome of the visit.
Meanwhile he progressed in painting from a divisionist and neo-impressionist technique to a facile imitation of Gauguin's Breton style, then to a combination of Cézanne and Gauguin, to conclude with painting of Oriental subjects in a style not so very far removed from that of Gerome. He imitated everyone in turn, only to end by becoming that drab eclectic thing—what the French call a "pompier" or we an "Academician." Thus he justified Gauguin's sardonic prophecy that "Bernard would end up something like Benjamin Constant!"
We owe Bernard a debt in that he has preserved for us the beautiful letters which Van Gogh wrote to him, and—more precious debt—that he has given us those rare talks and letters in which that old stoic Cézanne revealed a glimpse of his agony. But we owe Bernard nothing in that he has seen fit to defame the art and character of the man whose style he was the first to copy—Paul Gauguin. But of this more later.
III
The winter of 1886 found Gauguin again in Paris. Here he met another artist whose life was destined to have upon his an influence quite different from that of Emile Bernard.
This was Vincent Van Gogh, newly arrived from Holland. Gauguin has left on record in a piece of prose called Les Crevettes Roses his first impression of Van Gogh, which proves beyond dispute that Gauguin loved Van Gogh and admired him, despite his habitual reserve and the haughty disdain with which he was already looking upon all things European.
At this time Gauguin was still painfully seeking, still patiently and laboriously struggling towards his own self-realization. Van Gogh, although five years younger, had fully realized himself in essence—was, in fact, realized from the beginning. The difference between them was that Van Gogh was an humble Dutch peasant, with the mystic blend of religion and animality which is common to Flemish and Dutch artists (for example, Breughel, Rubens or Verhaeren), while Gauguin was a Spaniard, hard and aristocratic, but corrupted by cosmopolitan influences and the strain of French blood.