Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

und was the village of Pont-Aven in

his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by Tahit

ccupied those lands which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth century-with its railroads and

this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him. Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in appearance, as in manners, a sailor-the eye, the direct curt speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in him had been accentuate

Jacob with

re he was visited by Emile Bernard, then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with Ga

extremely bad poetry. He next went in for painting, raced off to Brittany to see Gauguin, was received with coolness, ran back to Paris. Here he found Van Gogh fresh from Holland and, when Van Gogh in tur

guin, to conclude with painting of Oriental subjects in a style not so very far removed from that of Gerome. He imitated everyone in turn, only to end by becoming that drab ecl

as given us those rare talks and letters in which that old stoic Cézanne revealed a glimpse of his agony. But we owe Bernard nothing in t