Gauguin himself, when he returned to Paris at the close of this year 1889, pinned a frieze of Hokusai and Utamaro prints round the walls of his studio.
But the existence of this somewhat baroque and exotic school of Cloissonism, of which the leader was Anquetin (later ranked with the Syntheticists), does not fully explain the use of Syntheticism with its greater insistence upon decorative unity, and its clearer affinities to the work of the Italian primitives.
As to the origin of Syntheticism we have divergent statements from contemporary witnesses.
The English artist, A.S. Hartrick, who was studying in Paris from 1886 to 1889 and who knew personally both Gauguin and Van Gogh, ascribes the Synthetic theory to Gauguin in these terms:—
"From a study of thirteenth century glass he (Gauguin) got an idea of design and color which exactly suited his state of development, and he then proceeded to translate it into an art of his own, using oil paint as a vehicle."[1]
Of similar opinion is the well known French artist and writer, Maurice Denis, whose work has done so much to popularise Gauguin. He declares in his book "Theories,"[2] that Gauguin was the "incontestable originator" and master of the new movement, to which he gives two names: Neo-Traditionism and Symbolism. In the first account which he wrote of the movement in 1890, an account obtained from the lips of Paul Sérusier, one of the earliest of Gauguin's disciples after 1889, Denis includes the following interesting paragraph:
"Did not Paul Gauguin originate this ingenious and unpublished history of modeling?
"At the beginning there was the pure arabesque, as little deceptive of the eye as possible; a wall is empty; cover it with symmetrical spots of form, harmonious in color:—stained glass, Egyptian pictures, Byzantine mosaics.
"From this comes the painted bas-relief:—metopes of the Greek temple, the church of the Middle Ages.
"Then the attempt to attain to the ornamental deception of the eye practised in Antiquity is resumed in the fifteenth century by the Italian primitives, who replace the painted bas-relief by paintings modeled to imitate bas-relief, but in other respects preserve the first idea of decorative unity. Recall also under what conditions Michaelangelo, a sculptor, decorated the Sistine ceiling.