But Puvis, though nearly fifty, was still unknown, still dreaming of walls to conquer, still buried away from the eyes of the young men in the slumbrous depths of the official salons, while Impressionism was the succès de scandale of the day.
Gauguin heard of Impressionism and became a devout follower of its theories. He painted pictures in the manner of Camille Pissarro, who was a compatriot of Madame Gauguin, having been born in the Island of St. Thomas in the Antilles, then Danish territory. Gauguin took part in the exhibitions of the Impressionist group in 1880 and 1881.
Huysmans, then as later the disciple of Naturalism pushed to its extreme limit, praised a nude of his because it was ugly. Gauguin began to be talked about, not only as a well-to-do amateur, but as a coming artist. But his work at the Bourse was exhausting his strength and his time.
Although he had now a wife and five children dependent on him, Gauguin in January, 1883, took the rash step of quitting the financial world and devoting himself solely to art.
This decision was, as Dr. Segalen says in his valuable Preface to the letters Gauguin wrote from Tahiti, the true turning-point in his career. When Paul Gauguin said to himself, "Henceforward I will paint every day," he was not only satisfying his vague and latest personal ambition and aptitude, he was setting himself to the fulfillment of a great impersonal duty: he was beginning to clear away the sophistications not only of his own nature but of modern art.
IV
It is important to note that Gauguin was thirty-five years of age when he came to this decision. This proves that the decision was no hasty one, of which he was liable to repent later. At such an age a man has arrived at his intellectual maturity; and, when this man is a Paul Gauguin, we may feel sure that he does not alter his whole manner of living from a mere desire for change. Gauguin had something to express and knew it. He had better work to do than dabbling in stocks and shares. And to this work he was determined to devote himself despite all opposition.
But had he not been instinctively a nomad and a savage, with the desire for freedom, for life without compromise and for the harmony that comes only from a natural expression of one's deepest instincts, this decision might never have been taken. As a husband and father he now had others dependent upon him. That he set aside their claims to follow the deeper call proves that, as he later said, he believed himself to have the right to dare everything. And he was probably at first confident of success, thinking an artistic career likely to be as easy to manage as that of a speculator.
Madame Gauguin seems to have acquiesced in this decision. She was naturally desirous to be ranked as the wife of a famous and successful man, and her husband may well have dazzled her with the prospects of his success. In any case, she was soon destined to sad disillusionment.