Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:
For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.
His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free time making art, drawing obsessively and learning how to paint and sculpt. He could afford to be “carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Prideaux writes, noting that his possessions included 12 paintings by Cézanne and 14 pairs of pants. “Art was his mistress. Mette was his wife. He was content.” A stock market crash in 1882 upended all that. Gauguin lost his job and had to scramble to find a way to support his family, which soon included five children. They all moved to Denmark, where he sold tarpaulins. He found life there to be stuffy to the point of stultifying. He realized he had to leave. “I only want to paint,” he wrote to a friend. “Everybody hates me because I paint but it is the only thing I can do.”
more here.
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