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Updated: June 5, 2025
Alas! such ingratitude must rankle. To see the major portion of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cézannes, with here and there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the older men. And now we reach the holy precincts.
Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of all the rebel musicians of to-day.
It is as moral as Hogarth and as bitter as Rops. It recalls the Montmartre days of the artist when he was acquainted with Paul Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Two women are crossing a bridge. Their actuality is impressed upon the retina in a marvellous ly definite way. They live, they move. One is gowned in dotted green, the other in black.
They often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: "Great artists never look back."
Gauguin uttered the paradox, "Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece," and the novelist Elémir Bourges cried, "This is the painting of a vintager!" Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the Cézannes, Anquetin admired; but, as Bernard adds, Jacques Blanche bought. So did Durand-Ruel, who has informed me that a fine Cézanne to-day is a difficult fish to hook.
There had been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed at.
It was true enough, as Lansing had not failed to note, that the Princess Mother adored prehistoric art, and Russian music, and the paintings of Gauguin and Matisse; but she also, and with a beaming unconsciousness of perspective, adored large pearls and powerful motors, caravan tea and modern plumbing, perfumed cigarettes and society scandals; and her son, while apparently less sensible to these forms of luxury, adored his mother, and was charmed to gratify her inclinations without cost to himself "Since poor Mamma," as he observed, "is so courageous when we are roughing it in the desert."
The violent deformations, the intensity of vision, the explosive hues a novel gamut of rich tones and the strangeness of the subject-matter caused a nine days' gossip; yet the exhibition was not a great success. Gauguin was too new, too startling, too original for his generation; he is yet for the majority, though he may be the Paint God of the twentieth century.
In 1891 and 1892, at Tahiti, Gauguin painted many pictures masterpieces his friends and disciples call them which were later shown at an exhibition held in the Durand-Ruel Galleries. Paris shuddered or went into ecstasy over these blazing transcriptions of the tropics; over these massive men and women, nude savages who stared with such sinister magnetism from the frames.
He remarked the tumbledown condition of the house, and said: "I have sat under that toil de chaume, that straw roof, and talked with and played for a painter who was living there quite apart from the world. He was Monsieur Paul Gauguin, and he had a very distingué establishment.
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