Does Gauguin need to be redeemed?

A review of “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin” by Sue Prideaux

May 13, 2025

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (W.W. Norton, May 13)

In an interview on the Times Literary Supplement podcast, biographer Sue Prideaux says that her award-winning book on the life of Paul Gauguin was inspired by the controversy surrounding a 2019 exhibition of the artist’s work at the National Gallery, London.

Gauguin’s sexual relationships with young girls during his stints in Polynesia, his often erotic, exoticized artistic depictions of them, and the general awkwardness of a Western painter mining indigenous culture for material during the height of French colonialism, have made him an easy and perhaps justified target for contemporary ire.

“There were calls for him to be cancelled and even for his paintings to be burned,” says Prideaux. The controversy compelled her to examine whether it was tenable to enjoy Gauguin’s work while granting that he was, in fact, a terrible man. At the time of the show, Christopher Riopelle, the co-curator of the exhibition, told The Independent that “I don’t think, any longer, that it’s enough to say, ‘Oh well, that’s the way they did it back then.’”

Well six years later Sue Prideaux is here to tell us that, apparently, it is enough to say “that’s the way they did it back then.”

*Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?* Paul Gaugin, 1897. Photo taken at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Billed as a rehabilitation of a misunderstood artist, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin builds its argument around two relatively new pieces of evidence—the recent discovery of Avant et après, a long-lost memoir/manifesto that Gauguin wrote about his work and his time in Polynesia, and the chemical analysis of four teeth found in a bottle at Gauguin’s hut in the Marquesas, which were linked to the artist by genetic testing.

Prideaux uses the narrative in Avant et après to cast Gauguin as a thorn in the side of French colonial administrators, as a man who fought for the rights of the native peoples he lived alongside. She also claims that the lack of mercury deposits in Gauguin’s teeth (which would have been evidence of a treatment for syphilis) shows that he did definitely not have the disease and could not have spread it to his young partners as many have long claimed—though I believe this actually only shows that he was never treated for it, not that he didn’t have it.1

That he had sexual relationships with young girls is undisputed—there is some disagreement as to whether the youngest was 13 or 15—but Prideaux accurately points out that the young girls Gauguin slept with were, technically speaking, above the legal age of consent in France during the 1890s. Furthermore, she describes a Polynesian culture where young girls were effectively raised as sexual chattel, freely traded and used by men as a form of social currency or handed over on a whim as a gesture of hospitality. Her account of this is, frankly, nauseating from a modern perspective. To her credit, Prideaux notes that Tehamana, Gauguin’s first child bride, was “doubly a victim: trafficked by her family for an advantageous connection, and victim to the lust of a much older European man.”

Still, she is quick to say that Tehamana’s return to Gauguin after some time apart “argues affection” and thereafter focuses mainly on her positive effect on the artist’s work. To Prideaux, there’s not much to dissect: Gauguin was merely following the cultural mores of the times and societies in which he lived.

But I came away from this book thinking that this interest in redeeming Gauguin isn’t really about the artist at all. It goes back to what Prideaux told the TLS. Can you enjoy Gauguin’s work while accepting that he was a terrible man? I think what Prideaux decided was, no, she couldn’t do both. And therefore she needed to devise a way to enjoy the work without having to grapple with the complexity of the artist’s life and actions at all. By attributing Gauguin’s misdeeds to his environment and the prevailing culture, Prideaux is able to quickly brush past them and focus on what brings her pleasure—the aesthetic beauty of his paintings.2

Many of the reviews that accompanied the UK release of the book were eager to go along with this. The Times review, especially, seems to revel in the freedom afforded by Prideaux’s account:

Gauguin’s great offence, it seems, was that he had a “type”, as we all do. In his case, it just happened to be young, dark and assertive women.

Gross.

In an essay for The Guardian, Prideaux herself writes:

The age of consent in France and the colonies was 13. This was not untypical of the world at the time. In the US, it varied between 10 and 12. As I finished the book in 2023, Japan raised the age from 13 to 16. These facts horrify and disgust me. However, within the context of the time, Gauguin’s Polynesian lovers were without exception “of age”. Revolting as it is, he was doing nothing illegal or even unusual for that time.

Prideaux’s implication that something legally permitted or socially permissible should be immune from judgement strikes me as misguided and dangerous. First off, isn’t the age of consent is immaterial here? Prideaux has already admitted that Tehamana did not initially consent to the relationship with Gauguin, but was “trafficked by her family.” Beyond that, the thought-terminating cliche “within the context of the time” is simply insufficient as an argument.3 In fact, many of Gauguin’s contemporaries understood that the then-prevailing ages of consent were enabling the sexual exploitation of young girls, and that this was a bad thing:

Age of consent reformers [in the late 19th century] saw sexuality as a vehicle of power that in complex ways kept women subordinated in society. Ultimately, they questioned the state's conferral of privilege in law of male sexual interests to the detriment of women and girls; thus they exposed the state's complicity in what otherwise appeared to be wholly private acts of sexual oppression. (Jane E. Larson, “Rape Reform in Late Nineteenth Century America,” 1997)4

What goes unsaid in Prideaux’s account is that this alleged social permissibility arose in a political environment in which women had few, if any, rights at all. Notably, at least in the U.S., ages of consent were highest in states where women had won suffrage:

In Cheyenne, they had just secured a bill raising the age of consent to eighteen years, which is, I think, the highest of any of the states. I asked the women how they obtained this excellent law, and they replied: “We women vote in Wyoming, and our legislators understand they must give us what just laws we ask for, or they will not hold office again.” (Wyoming Union Signal, 1891)

1891—the same year Gauguin met Tehamana.5 Prideaux makes no effort to examine why age of consent laws were they way they were in Gauguin’s time or whether anyone felt they were a problem. They simply were, and that’s good enough for her.

To say that Gauguin’s actions were socially acceptable is to say he lived in a world where most women lacked political agency and where what was socially acceptable was determined largely by men who, if they were not like Gauguin, at least sympathized with men like him.

Larson notes that many 19th century women activists came to believe that “legislatures composed entirely of men were not acting in good faith… but instead out of self-interest.”

“It will not do to let the modern man determine the ‘age of consent’… to make all laws and choose all officers… thus leaving his own case wholly in his own hands. To continue this method is to make it hard as possible for men to do right and as easy as possible for them to do wrong.” (Frances Willard, 1895)
To witness male lawmakers behaving as if they shared a common interest in the sexual exploitation of girls and young women (even if an individual man had no such desires and had committed no such crimes) irretrievably demolished the argument that women could rely upon male chivalry for sexual protection. (Larson)

Understanding this history makes it all the more infuriating when Prideaux drops a line like this:

The age of consent in France and the colonies was thirteen, so nobody minded.

Nobody minded.

*Women and a White Horse*. Paul Gauguin, 1903. Photo taken at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

I’m not advocating that Gauguin be cancelled or his paintings burned, or what have you. But to ignore what he did is to miss an opportunity. Prideaux isn’t wrong to say that what Gauguin did was “allowed” in his time. But this was because, whether in the U.S. or France or the South Pacific, there was a legally and socially validated regime of sexual exploitation that systematically took advantage of young girls in order to service the desires of adult men. The takeaway isn’t that Gauguin wasn’t a predator, it’s that, perversely, he had a legal right to be one.

And it wasn’t even that long ago, all things considered. That seems like something worth reflecting on, and if Gauguin’s art and life can raise the salience of that for modern audiences, we should embrace that. When we recognize that what Gauguin did was morally wrong, yet legally and socially permitted, it compels us to ask whether we are likewise committing offenses in the present that will one day be seen as grotesque in the future. What moral transgressions might we be guilty of simply because we face no legal or social pressures to do otherwise? What contemporary taboos would we deign to violate if suddenly the threat of punishment or social shame was lifted? Forget about redeeming Gauguin—how are we going to redeem ourselves?

But these are hard questions and, understandably, complicate some people’s enjoyment of the pretty pictures. To that, all I can say is grow up. We can do both. I think often of a line I read somewhere on the internet that I believe may have originated on, of all places, a wrestling podcast: “You can keep it, but keep it in context.”

Gauguin was a talented, revolutionary artist, an awful husband and father, and a legally compliant sexual predator. And Wild Thing is a well-written book that, nevertheless, fails in its responsibility to the present. It tries to let its readers off the hook by telling them they don’t have to bother themselves with all the difficulties that Gauguin’s life and art present, that they don’t have to confront what it might say about the depravity of the era he lived in and what we in the present may have inherited from it.

And listen—you actually don’t have to engage with any of that, really. Nobody can make you do it.

But you should.

Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. His criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His short fiction about aspiring ghosts, trivial psychics, and petty saboteurs has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, BULL, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ink In Thirds, and Uncharted. He is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.

These things, not others

Discussion about this post