Gauguin [antikvár]

Gauguin More than with most painters, the shape of Gauguin's turbulent career was predetermined by his heredity and early environment. The popular idea of the successful business man who suddenly and surprisingly decided to be a painter could scarcely be further from the truth. What is more remarkable, indeed, is how closely the art which Gauguin created and which was to have such a widespread influence responded to his private needs. His life and work were dominated by the feeling that he must somehow recapture a lost paradise dimly remembered from early childhood. Unable to find it, he remade it in his own art, but only at the cost of self-destruction. The drama was played out over little more than twenty years, against a background of the most momentous changes in the history of art since the Renaissance. And although Gauguin may not have been the greatest artist involved, his contribution was arguably the major one. Eugene-Henri-Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848, at the most violent phase of the 1848 Revolution - a propitious enough moment. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a 34-year-old journalist, who worked for a liberal newspaper that was soon to be suppressed. Clovis came from Orléans, and there is nothing in the Gauguin family history of market gardeners and small business men to suggest an artistic temperament. With Clovis's wife, Aline-Marie Chazal, it is a very different matter however. She was only 22 when her son was born, and already had a one-year-old daughter, Marie, Paul's only sibling. Aline was the daughter of André Chazal, engraver, and of Flora Tristan, author and social reformer. Theirs had been an ill-matched, short-lived marriage; it culminated in Chazal attempting to murder his wife and being sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. Paul owed much to this tempestuous pair. The Chazals were a family of artist-engravers of modest talent and considerable industry. André might have won conventional success and shown his work at the Salon as his brother did, had he not employed as a colourist in his workshop the 17-year-old girl who was to become his wife. Flora Tristan was the illegitimate daughter of a young woman, Thérese Laisnay, of whose background nothing whatever is known. She seems to have fled to Spain at the French Revolution, though whether she was an aristocrat or an adventuress, it is impossible to say. In Bilbao she became the mistress of a well connected Spanish colonel of Dragoons, Don Mariano de Tristan Moscoso. They moved to Paris where Flora was born in 1803: the liaison was a stable one, but Don Mariano died suddenly before bringing himself to marry his mistress. This catapulted her from luxury to penury, and the rest of her miserable life was spent pleading the claims for herself and her daughter. She had grounds for feeling that she was owed something. The Tristan Moscoso family belonged to the old Aragonese nobility, and Fig. 1 Photograph of Paul Gauguin in 1873