Wild thing

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In ‘Wild Thing’, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision. Prideaux conjures Gauguin’s visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from new material and information from the artist’s family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.