Possibly more than any other artist, Gau guin has been the subject of a wide variety of myths about the role of the artist and the creative process. The construction of a legend surrounding the man and his work is partly due to an attempt to place him at the beginnings of modernist art, in recog nition of the formal innovations in his work. His exotic personality, the subject of a number of films and novels, lends itself to the creation of a fiction. Yet the development of myths surrounding the artist and his production began during his lifetime and much of it was manipulated by Gau guin himself.

……

Paul Gauguin is almost as well known for his bohemian life, his flight from what he called the disease of civilization", as for his exotic painting. He was born in Peru, educated in France, and spent five years as a merchant seaman. In 1872, aged 24, he became a stock broker in Paris, took up painting as a leisure activity and exhibited at several of the Im pressionist exhibitions, becoming a full-time painter in 1883.

In this reassessment of Gauguin, art historian Lesley Stevenson sets his life and work in the social and artistic context of late nineteenth century France in order to dispel some of the mythology that has accumulated around him,  much of it created by the artist himself. By emphasizing the importance of the early work, painted in his spare time when he was a successful and wealthy stockbroker, she demonstrates that Gauguin started as a con ventional painter in the impressionist style. Only after losing his job did he decide to com mit himself to painting and begin to produce the highly coloured, heavily simplified works associated with his mature style.

Gauguin recognized the importance of patrons, dealers and critics in the formation of an artistic reputation and began consciously to cultivate a bohemian persona for himself, founded on contemporary ideas Of the "civi lized savage". The desire to seek out "primitive" motifs took him first to Brittany, and the author traces in the work he did there many of the themes and techniques more usually regarded as typical of his South Seas work. After Brittany Gauguin settled successively in Martinique, Tahiti and finally Hivaoa but the author shows that, even in the South Seas, Gauguin was far from being the "savage" personality he liked to adopt in his art and writings. He continued to be bound to Paris by a need to promote and sell his work in the French capital.

Introduction

Landscape

The Seine at the Pont d"Iena, Snow

The Market Gardens at Vaugirard

Still Life with Oranges

Entrance to a Village

Sleeping Child

Cows in a Landscape

Women Bathing

The Breton Shepherdess

Four Breton Women

By the Sea, Martinique

Mango Pickers, Martinique

Tropical Landscape on Martinique

Martinique Landscape

Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven

Self-Portrait (Les Miserables)

Vision after the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

Portrait of Madeleine Bernard

Still Life, Fete Gloanec

Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers

Night Cafe at Arles

The Alyscamps

Old Women at Arles

Grape Harvest at Arles, Human Anguish

Still Life with Fan

The Schuffenecker Family

La Belle Angele

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

Christ in the Garden of Olives(Agony in the Garden)

Yellow Christ

Green Christ (Breton Calvary)

Portrait of a Woman, with Still Life by CEzanne

Landscape at Le Pouldu

The Loss of Virginity or the Awakening of Spring

Tahitian Landscape

The Meal

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

Man with an Ax

Te Tiare Farani (The Flowers of France)

Nafea Faa Ipoipo? (When will you Marry ?)

Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead keeps Watch)

Arearea (Pranks)

Peasant Women from Brittany

Te Tamari no Atua (The Birth of Christ, Son of God)

Nave Nave Mahana (Wonderful Days)

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Three Tahitians

And the Gold of their Bodies

The Offering

Acknowledgments