The New Yorker:

The artist has lately been derided as a colonizer and a pedophile, the creep of the Post-Impressionists. A new book reëxamines his vision.

By Alexandra Schwartz

In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin, “Wild Thing,” is the first to appear in English in thirty years—he carried “a hundred meters of canvas, a large collection of paint tubes from Lefranc & Cie, a rifle to shoot the wild game he would eat, a French horn, two mandolins, a guitar, a pile of music by Schubert and Schumann,” and “at least a hundred postcards and photographs that he sometimes called his ‘little friends’ and sometimes his ‘museum of the mind.’ ” These included reproductions of paintings by Degas, Dürer, Raphael, and Manet, and also images of Javanese dancers and the friezes at the temple of Borobudur.

The pictures proved more useful than the rifle. As Gauguin soon discovered, there was little on Tahiti to shoot, or even to pick. Chasing the wild boars that lived on the slopes of the island’s volcanoes required a hunting party. Chickens and goats were privately owned, as were coconut trees. Locals invited Gauguin to share their meals, but he was too proud to accept. In the middle of the South Pacific, he lived off imported corned beef, bought, at great expense, from a Chinese grocery.

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