CONTENTS
[PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885]
[PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889]
[PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891]
[PART IV: THE RETURN TO SAVAGERY 1891-1895]
[PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 1895-1903]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[SELF-PORTRAIT OF GAUGUIN], Frontispiece
[PORTRAIT OF GAUGUIN'S MOTHER]
[THE PAINTER SCHUFFENECKER AND HIS FAMILY]
[STRUGGLE OF JACOB WITH THE ANGEL]
[THE IDOL]
[TAHITIAN WOMEN]
[HINA MARURU (FEAST TO HINA)]
[THE OLD SPIRIT]
[CALVARY]
[MATAMUA (OLDEN DAYS)]
PAUL GAUGUIN
PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885
I
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 classes, 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 Assembly. 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 glass of wine, he was content with things as they were. If the industrial classes 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.