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Lead book review

The great French painter who had no time for France

Describing himself as the ‘savage from Peru’, Paul Gauguin avoided French society when he could, returning to Polynesia in 1895, where he spent his final years on the island of Hiva Oa

7 September 2024

9:00 AM

7 September 2024

9:00 AM

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux

Faber, pp.416, 30

In 1855, Paul Gauguin’s widowed mother Aline returned to her husband’s family in Orleans after seven years in Peru. She brought back her daughter Marie, eight-year-old son Paul and her collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. They had no commercial value but those strange objects, sprouting the heads of birds and animals, had a power that the westernised world had lost touch with.

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