paul gauguin--3/20/2026

20 Mar 2026

paul gauguin--3/20/2026

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Today's selection -- from Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux. Paul Gauguin loses his job at a bank:

“In 1882, L'Union Générale, an ill-founded bank, collapsed. It had been established six years previously by Roman Catholic grandees with the aim of destroying the hold of German Jews, notably the Rothschilds, over the French economy. Other banks fell in its wake. The Paris stock market crashed. Gauguin was given notice to quit his job. His meteoric financial ascent had never taught him to budget or – God forbid! – to save. He had always enjoyed spending to his limits and beyond; now his portfolio of shares had lost its value, the art market was wiped out, and he was left with debts to pay off, a wife whom he had educated up to expensive tastes and four children to support. He tried hard to get another job in the financial sector but his ostentatious taxi-ticking ways and irritating proliferation of trousers, taken together with his preference for socialising with low-life artists and artisans rather than his smart colleagues, lent a delicious Schadenfreude to witnessing his fall. If Gustave Arosa had still been a power in the land, things might have been different, but Arosa was old and ill. In the year following the crash, he died. With his death, Gauguin lost his safety net.

“The following year, 1883, was spent fruitlessly job-seeking, with pressure mounting when Mette again became pregnant. In December, she gave birth to their fifth child, Paul, called Pola to differentiate him from his father. Pola brought along with him the spectral vision of Gauguin turning into Papa Pissarro, the father of a multitudinous brood, knocking on doors to sell his pictures for seven francs apiece while his wife became ever more discontented and shrewish. Anywhere would be cheaper to live than Paris. In January 1884, with baby Pola a month old, they moved eighty or so miles north-west, to the city of Rouen, long beloved of artists for its cool northern light and picturesque medieval subjects: spires, bell towers, crooked lanes and half-timbered houses jostling for space inside a ring of tall ramparts rising out of smooth, expansive views of woods and meadows. Turner had painted there. Monet, already captivated, would soon return to obsess over the light on Rouen's cathedral front. Pissarro had told Gauguin that he never tired of painting the city's inexhaustible motifs. He had also told him that a collector of Impressionist paintings lived there, a pastry chef named Murer. This sounded hopeful.

“He rented a little house on the Impasse Malherne (now Impasse Gauguin), a narrow lane on the towering heights of the Rampe Beauvoisine. He figured that he had enough money to keep him going for a year. He started work, producing pictures at a furious rate, more or less one a day. Mostly landscapes, local variations on motifs he had painted with Pissarro and Cézanne. Gauguin was painting alone, and it was not working. Everything was wrong on the canvas, and he had no idea how to put it right. He needed Pissarro's critical guidance. He kept inviting him to come; Pissarro kept refusing. Eventually, in April 1884, he sent seven paintings to Durand-Ruel. The plan was for Pissarro to visit the gallery to critique them, and Durand-Ruel to exhibit and sell them. One painting was 'handed over to the financier Lafuite on the very day that it arrived' presumably in payment for a debt. None of the others sold. Pissarro went to look at them and wrote to tell Gauguin that he found them petty and monotonous. Gauguin knew as much. 'I have not yet arrived where I want to be. I must chafe a little longer yet,' he replied humbly.

Mette Gauguin in an Evening Dress by Paul Gauguin

“He was looking for a money-making job. The pastry cook Murer had been a dreadful disappointment. Far from purchasing, he accepted just one painting to hang in his hotel, where it failed to find a buyer: Gauguin made no further impression on the city, either as a man or as an artist. Accustomed to attention, he felt invisible. His confidence was failing. He and Mette were beginning to squabble about money. He decided to paint a 'society' portrait of her that might bring in commissions from Rouen's pretty women. Wanting to look elegant for the portrait, Mette bought an expensive dress on credit. This led to a row, and then he discovered that she had secretly been borrowing large sums from their friends: 400 francs from Schuffenecker, 2,000 francs from Mrs Heegaard. He was furious; she was furious. She pointed out that children were expensive, and they had more than they could afford to keep. Already they had sent Emil back to Denmark where the Countess Moltke, a contact of bygone days who was rich and fond of Mette, had undertaken to pay for Emil's education. For fear of getting pregnant again, Mette refused to sleep with Gauguin. He ranted about divorce and the result was Mette in Evening Dress, a second passionate portrait of his wife that, like Meite Asleep on a Sofa, depicts Mette the Inaccessible.

“Sensual, challenging and unnerving, she is decked out in full evening dress, gloves, fan, hair piled up in an elaborate chignon, a narrow black ribbon round the creamy neck directing the eye down to the bosom. Gauguin always struggled with what he saw as potentially saccharine subjects and Mette in Evening Dress is certainly not as pretty as a selling canvas ought to be. He could not yet achieve the textural luminosities of silk, satin, roses and pearls that had made Renoir's 1874 The Theatre Box the ne plus ultra of such portraits. The best bit of painting is the optical mixture of pink and pale apple-green on the swooping bodice; otherwise it is a picture of an angry wife turning away from her husband and refusing to look at him, but even while they were quarreling over the cost of the dress, Gauguin admitted to her that he liked it very much.”