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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux Review

This detailed biography complicates our perception of the bad boy of French art and illuminates his fraught friendship with Van Gogh

Prideaux lets him construct his own epitaph: “virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them” As a young man back in Paris, Gauguin showed no interest in art; he pursued a successful career as a stockbroker, until he lost his job after the banking crash in 1882. The family moved to Denmark to save money, but Gauguin had by then become a mostly sober guest around the raucous bar tables of the impressionists in Paris, returning home to Mette when his fellow artists ended their drunken evenings in the city’s brothels. In Prideaux’s retelling here of Gauguin’s fateful stay with Vincent in Arles in 1888, you get a sense of the unease the painter must have felt when he arrived to discover that Van Gogh had adorned his bedroom with multiple giant sunflower canvases, and that he had purchased 12 rush-bottomed chairs on which he imagined their (as yet unidentified) disciples might sit.

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