Part 1 (1/2)

Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

by John Gould Fletcher

PART I: THE FORMATION 1849-1885

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 hisIt see 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 the as the peasant had his far, 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

The National assely moderate, and the leaders of the Provisional Government discovered that they preferred to stand with the majority rather than to fall with the Parisian extrele On the fifteenth of May, a mob attehteenth, Lamartine, the for a conciliatory speech The Governes for the Parisian unemployed or run the risk of an appeal to force A scheme was started, but it proved to be costly, and on the twenty-first of June the Government faced about and announced that it intended to proceed no further with its project Three days later the storm broke Two hundred and twenty-one barricades arose as if by s and manned by sixty thousand men For three days the mob kept up a desperate resistance; then the last barricade fell, the blood ashed off the paveood sense”

was restored

There is a poetic justice in the coincidence of some events On the seventh of June a son, Paul, was born to M and Madaht obscurely into the world to the sound of cannon, was destined by one of the ironic dispensations of Nature to beco and as ireat atterowing bourgeois civilization, the middle-class morality, of the late nineteenth century; his art was to speak the proain walk naked, unashamed and free, as in Eden He was destined to break beneath the inert weight of social conventions and stupidities, as the revolution had been broken by the arovernment: but his ideas were to point the way to, new conceptions of art and of life, which only the future can realize

Clovis Paul Gauguin, to give the father his full name, was a petty journalist from Orleans He had a post as collaborator on one of the obscure newspapers of Liberal opinion, that so greatly flourished about this tiht, as is the case with the fathers of uin that we must turn for an explanation of the character of her fauin's hter of a certain Chazal, of e know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist paitator, Flora Tristan

Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru Her father was a Spaniard of noble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso He served as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the wars of independence which severed Peru fro positions of dignity and affluence under the Republic In 1818 he sent his daughter to school in Paris She eloped the next year with Chazal and was disowned by her parents After the birth of her child she separated fro a reconciliation with her fa for the self-willed, ihter, and she drifted back to Paris, where she attely Socialistic tendencies She becae, of humanitarianis speeches In 1836 she had the ain in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the offense A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-unions, re her zeal for their cause and her personal beauty--which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of her speeches--subscribed the sum necessary to put up a rand-parents of the child who had just been born into the world The tragic and violent union of Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist he later became

In Chazal we find the source of his violence and headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of eoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicise Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab, Celt and African

Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even other currents--currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had subdued but not conquered

Whatever else destiny held in store for hiuin could never be wholly assimilated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous and fickle city of Paris

II

The earliest adventures of the future painter coery which were to recur so often in his later life In December, 1851, the makeshi+ft Republic came to an end and Louis Napoleon, by an easy _coup d'etat_, restored the Euin found himself ruined with the suspension of the Liberal paper for which he wrote There was only one hope reht do so for Paul and his sister Marie So the fa the terrible passage through the Straits of Magellan, Clovis Gauguin was seized with heart failure and died His body was taken ashore and buried at Port Famine, or Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in the world, in Chile

The mother and her two orphaned children were received with kindness by the head of the family, Flora Tristan's uncle, Don Pio Tristan y Moscoso Concerning this personage Gauguin himself told many anecdotes in later years Probablyfable pure and siuin at this tie We know that the fa, who lived in the old Castillian uin doubtless derived hout life--a blend of haughtiness, reserve and egois often a real shyness before people And here he saw, also for the first time, works of art produced by a non-European civilization: cerain The ree, primitive art undoubtedly influenced his uin's stay in Lirandfather died in France, and his mother returned to that country in order to obtain her share of his estate, which proved to be only a small sum

In later years, the painter believed, or affected to believe, that if his lected her relations in France she would have been left heiress to Don Pio Tristan's property

It is probable that Gauguin was heretobut fruitless speculation to wonder what course the boy's ht have taken had it been subjected for a few more years to the influence of Peruvian life Peru undoubtedly gave him a love for the tropics, for exotic, out-of-the-way, old-fashi+oned places, unspoiled by the nineteenth century Unconsciously many of the traits that made his character so little comprehensible to the French these years

France was now to give hi different He was to be educated, or rather to receive what passed for an education He ree of seventeen, hating his studies, beco more and more intractable and unteachable This seminary, as all such institutions in France at the time, was conducted by Jesuit priests

In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years that he had spent at the se And with malicious irony he said: ”And I also learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force not to be despised in the struggle with other people”