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Paradise


DR. CAROLINE BOYLE-TURNER Art Historian and Guest Lecturer


Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) had always been attracted to exotic places. From the age of 2 to 6, he lived in Lima, Peru. As a young adult, he plied the coasts of North and South America as a sailor in both the French Merchant Marine and the Navy. Once he became a full-time artist, he focused on Brittany, the Celtic province in Western France. As his art progressed and his curiosity for warmer and more exotic places grew, he turned to the French colonies farther afi eld: Martinique and Tahiti, fi nally fi nding his paradise in the Marquesas.


Arriving in Tahiti, in 1891, he was enchanted: Here he found brilliant tropical colors, strong, bright light that in the morning and evening saturated nature’s colors and cast a warm glow over everything he saw. He also quickly discovered a civilization he had learned about only two years earlier at the Paris Universal Exposition, where Polynesian native huts (and people) had been on display, as well as Marquesan war clubs, bowls, and tiki fi gures. He took leave of his wife and fi ve children with regret, but fully intended, at that point, to return to them one day as a successful, well-respected artist.


Gauguin was also fi lled with visions of scantily clad, beautiful Tahitian women ready to model for him and to introduce him to the idyllic life of ease and sexual freedom so vividly depicted by the French author Pierre Loti in T e Marriage of Loti. He was confronted, instead, with a colonial French town populated by French administrators and Catholic priests, Europeans seeking their fortunes, and a rapidly decreasing native population decimated by imported European diseases for which they had no resistance. He soon fl ed Papeete for various villages along the coast, seeking indigenous models/ companions with whom he could share his modest lodgings. He was curious about the fast disappearing Polynesian religion, customs, and daily life. Most vestiges of the past had been destroyed by the Church and French authorities. What he could not fi nd, he made up in his paintings depicting peaceful scenes of women strolling or relaxing, wearing colorful pareos or the all-enveloping dresses mandated by the Catholic Church and still worn today.


But Tahiti soon lost its appeal for Gauguin, who wanted a more authentic experience. He believed that the Marquesas, part of French Polynesia since 1842, retained more of the traditions that had been lost in Tahiti. With high hopes of fi nding his utopia there, he left Tahiti in 1901. Six days on a steamship and 1,500 kilometers


60 2020 Paul Gauguin Cruises | Paradise Found


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