Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

. He was now heartily sick of the sea, because of the enforced idleness and wearisome discipline that he had now endured aboar

-to-do Paris banker, Gustave Arosa. This man immediately found for Paul a place at Bertin's, a banking house with which he was conne

question whether his new position might not entail heavier responsibilities in the future. He had not been long at Bertin's before he found out how to make money quite easily. Possibly this was not a very difficult thing to do, for the Paris stock market had been utterly disorganized by the events of 1870-71,

stant clergyman of Copenhagen. The family was a good one and enjoyed an honorable position in the society of the Danish capital. The daughters had been e

openhagen. At any rate it seems that he was eager to marry, as the ceremony (a purely civil one, owing to his wife be

e than an amusement at first. Arosa was, in his way, an amateur of art and had collected a number of pictures by French artists of the day-among them Delacroix and Courbet. These works he engraved in photogravure-an art then in its infancy-and sent copies of the engravings to his personal friend

same time he began to attempt sculpture. He worked at first in marble, a material afterwards entirely rejected in favor of the more coarsely-grained

glass and pottery. His writings, particularly his share in "Noa Noa," show a considerable grasp of direct, poetic narrative-a gift that might very possibly have made of him a good poet. Throughout his life we are unable to regard him solely as a painter of pictures; his influence in opening new channels for ar

e of it. But his growth to artistic maturity was slower than in the case of artists

thing. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more d

chuffenecker

time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting.

tics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of p

ing. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature,

ver her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead. The

ured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, erected his monument of infamy to the memory

growth, in another sphere, of the

of the studio and substitu

" and left the painter free to pain

them elevated to the rank of a science; and on the other side, it led with equal inevitability to the total dependence of the pa

the tradition of classical, decorative painting descending from Giotto, through Rap

nquer, still buried away from the eyes of the young men in the slumbrous depths

f Camille Pissarro, who was a compatriot of Madame Gauguin, having been born in the Island of St. Thomas in the

of his because it was ugly. Gauguin began to be talked about, not only as a well-to-do amateu

him, Gauguin in January, 1883, took the rash step of quitt

auguin said to himself, "Henceforward I will paint every day," he was not only satisfying his vague and latest personal ambition and aptitude, he was sett