Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing is wise, engaging—and the first biography I’ve read that elects to disprove rumors of syphilis on its preface’s opening page. (Thanks to forensic testing of four of Paul Gauguin’s “heavily” decayed teeth. As if to ensure maximum indignity, they were found in an old jar he evidently liked to drink from.) Poor Gauguin, that it should come to this, more than 120 years after his death, alone, half blind, and racked with pain, in French Polynesia.
Gauguin’s family certainly didn’t advertise or champion convention. His father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist, and his French-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Tristan, published her diaries under the title—as Gauguin might have called his own journals—Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). She wrote the socialist tract The Workers’ Union (1843) and became, in Prideaux’s words, “an icon of the French feminist movement.”