Month: March 2012

The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany

The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johann Zoffany (1772-77)

Johan Zoffany was born Johannes Josephus Zoffaly in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1733.  His father Anton Zoffaly was a court cabinet maker and architect to Alexander Ferdinand, Prince of Thurn and Taxis and it was at the Prince’s court that young Johan was brought up.  When the Prince took up residence in Regensburg, Zoffany served as an apprentice to the local painter, Martin Speer.  In 1750, at the age of 17 when he had completed his apprenticeship Johann travelled to Rome and studied with the portrait painter, Agostino Masucci.  In 1757, now back in Germany, Zoffany was commissioned by the Elector of Trier to paint frescoes and paintings for his new palace at Trier and his Ehrenbreitstein Palace in Koblenz.

In 1760 Zoffany travelled to London.  Here he was initially employed by Benjamin Wilson, the painter and printmaker and it was from his connection with Wilson that Zoffany came to the attention of one of Wilson’s patrons, the actor and theatre impresario, David Garrick, and he commissioned Zoffany to paint a number of theatrical works which featured the actor in famous theatrical roles.  Garrick also had Zoffany paint some conversation pieces of he and his wife set in the grounds of his Hampton estates.  The term Conversation Piece is an informal group portrait, often full length but usually small in scale in a domestic interior or garden setting and was a very popular art genre in 18th century England.   They would often portray a group of people apparently engaged in genteel conversation or some activity.  Usually the group would be members of a family, but sometimes friends would be included.  In some conversation pieces groups of friends or members of a society were depicted.  It was for these works that Zoffany made his name in England.

Zoffany’s fame spread among the London elite and commissions started to roll in for his portraiture and conversation pieces.  One such commission came from the Prime Minister, John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, who wanted Zoffany to paint portraits of his three sons and another portrait of his three daughters.  It was thanks to Bute that Zoffany was introduced to King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte in 1763.  Both were impressed by his work and commissioned Zoffany to paint portraits of their family.  The Royal Academy of Arts had been founded in December 1768 through a personal act of King George III.  Its task was to promote the arts of design in Britain through education and exhibition.  There were originally thirty four founder members, with Sir Joshua Reynolds its first President.  The rules stated that there would be forty Academicians.  In a Council of the Royal Academy in November 1769 it was reported to those present that “his Majesty had been pleased to appoint Mr Johan Zoffany to be one of the forty Academicians”.  Zoffany was now a Nominated Member of the Academy.

The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy by Johan Zoffany (1771-2)

George III also set him a task to paint a group portrait of the Royal Academy members which Zoffany duly completed in 1772 and was entitled The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy.  Zoffany himself is seen with brush and palette in his hand at the far left of the painting.  The king and his wife were delighted with the painting and Queen Charlotte commissioned Zoffany to paint an even larger and more elaborate conversation piece set in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, which would depict the art treasures held within the octagonal room.   Zoffany travelled to Italy to carry out the commission in 1772 and did not complete the ambitious work until 1777.

Zoffany returned to England with his masterpiece but was distressed to find that his genre of conversation pieces had gone out of vogue and his work was no longer required by his wealthy and fashionable clients.  He could have reverted to his other artistic forte, that of portraiture, but at the time he had many very successful rivals for that type of work, such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds as well as the emerging “new kid on the bloc” George Romney.

By 1783 Zoffany had all but given up hope of receiving commissions for his work in England and decided to travel to India in his search for rich patrons.   For the next six years Zoffany bided his time in the sub-continent travelling between Calcutta and Lucknow completing commissions he received from the wealthy British colonials and the local Lucknow aristocracy.  Once again he had the opportunity to carry on with his beloved conversation pieces.  Such was the popularity of his work that he was inundated with commissions and by the time he returned to England in 1789 he had made his fortune.

Zoffany died in 1810, aged 77.  He was one of the greatest exponents of the English Conversation piece with its Rococo flamboyance and will also be remembered for the charm of his theatrical works depicting scenes from popular plays of the day.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today by Zoffany is looked upon as one of his greatest works.  It is his grand conversation piece entitled The Tribuna of the Uffizi, which he started in 1772 and completed in 1777.   Going to Italy at the behest of his Royal patrons, George III and his wife Queen Charlotte, to paint this work had not been his original plan as in 1772 he had hoped to secure a passage on Captain Cook’s vessel when he set sail on his second voyage to the South Seas but the offer of a sea voyage never materialised and so he took up the commission from Queen Charlotte to travel to Florence and record in a painting the collection of art and sculpture which the Grand Duke of Tuscany had put together in the Tribuna of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  Queen Charlotte had envisaged this work would be a pendant to Zoffany’s earlier work owned by the English rulers entitled Academicians of the Royal Academy which he completed in 1772 and was well received by the royal family.

The Tribuna was an octagonal room within the Uffizi Gallery, designed in the late 1580’s by Bernardo Buontalenti in which the art collection of Francesco de’ Medici would be housed.  In 1737 it came into the possession of Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  The commission was a great challenge to the talents of Zoffany as the Tribuna art collection was one of the greatest in all Europe.  Was it a true reproduction of what was there at the time?   Not quite, as Zoffany had to experiment and alter the perspective of the room in order to incorporate all the various pieces of sculpture and in some cases he had to reduce the size of individual pieces.  The collection of art in the Tribuna during the time Zoffany was painting it was also going through a slight reorganisation and this gave him the excuse to make his own decision as to what would be on display.   In doing so he omitted some paintings which were actually on display and added others which although housed in the Uffizi were never hung in the Tribuna.  One of these was Titian’s Venus of Urbino which we see in the central foreground.  There were also a number of paintings by Guido Reni which were housed in the Pitti Palace but were transported to the Uffizi just for Zoffany to copy!

There are twenty five paintings shown in this work.  How many can you identify?   All I will tell you is that amongst them there are six by Raphael, three by Guido Reni, two by Titian, two by Rubens and one each by Carracci, Corregio and Holbein.

Besides the works of art, sculptures and other artefacts, the painting is populated by no fewer than twenty two men all of whom were either connected with the Uffizi Gallery or were a miscellany of Grand Tourists.  So who were these Grand Tourists and what was the Grand Tour?  The Grand Tour was the traditional trip around Europe taken by mainly upper-class wealthy young European men, although primarily the term is associated with the British elite and nobility.   It reached the height of its popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and it was a kind of rite of passage for this wealthy elite.   One amusing aspect of Zoffany’s inclusion of the men was that during the many years he worked on the painting he would add and remove people as he saw fit and would tell some of the travellers they had to sit for him as the George III had specifically asked for their portrait to be included.  Of course that was never the case.  The one thing Zoffany was adamant about was that he would not portray a woman within the group.  It is thought that this could be due to the fact that he incorporated some lewd visual jokes into the painting.   Look at the group of men to the right who are staring at and fascinated by the backside of the Venus de Medici.  This sculpture had been well-known for the lewd comments made about it by the Grand Tourists.  In Vicci Coltman’s book entitled Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 she quotes a comment made by Charles Townley, the English country gentleman and antiquary who had made a couple of Grand Tours whilst Zoffany was painting his masterpiece.  Townley had said that he had been told that:

“…the sight of the Venus in the Florence Gallery will give you some yammering after a Tuscan Whore…”

It was not just the heterosexual innuendos that made Zoffany’s painting risqué, but his addition of two well known homosexuals, Thomas Patch, in the right foreground in conversation with another homosexual, Sir Horace Mann.  Patch is pointing at the sculpture The Wrestlers and their addition in the painting was to prove a step too far.

Zoffany returned to England in 1779 and delivered the painting to his royal patrons.   Queen Charlotte was horrified to see the room cluttered by so many men and worse still to incorporate lewd innuendos of both a heterosexual and homosexual nature.  She was especially shocked that Zoffany had included portraits of the two infamous homosexuals into the scene.  George III reluctantly paid for the work but had it placed out of sight in a room in Kew Palace.  The artist Joseph Farrington was active in the social, cultural, and professional art world of his time and he kept a daily diary from 13 July 1793 until his death, missing only a few days. This diary often referred to the London art world. The diary eventually constituted 16 volumes and in one of the volumes Farrington recounts a conversation between George III and the artist William Beechey in which he quotes the king as saying of Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi:

“…[The King] expressed wonder at Zoffany having done so improper a thing as to introduce the portraits of Sir Horace Man[n], [Thomas] Patch, & others, who were considered as men addicted to improper practices – He sd. The Queen wd. Not suffer the picture to be placed in any of Her apartments…”

It is thought it was not so much that Zoffany took it upon himself to add the twenty two Grand Tourists into the painting but it was the character of some of them that shocked and offended George III and his Queen.  Zoffany never again received a royal commission and from that day on lost their patronage.

This is a beautiful work and one of unbelievable detail.  I stood before it yesterday when I visited the preview of the Johan Zoffany RA, Society Observed exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.  If you are in London you should make a point on visiting this exhibition which runs until June 10th.

Tomorrow I will give you the answer to the names of the paintings and the artists who painted them

The Copley Family, by John Singleton Copley

The Copley Family by John Singleton Copley (1777)

In my last blog I looked at the English portraitist James Sharples and talked about how he took his family from England to America in search of patrons and their lucrative commissions.  He was just one of many European artists who decided that the way to make a fortune from their art was by crossing the Atlantic.  He of course had not only to compete against the new immigrant artists who had also made the journey but he also had to compete for work against America’s own painters.  Today in My Daily Art Display I am focusing my attention on of those great 18th century American artists, John Singleton Copley, who in fact moved across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, from Boston to London.

John Singleton Copley was born in 1738 in Boston, Massachusetts.  Both his parents, Richard and Marie were of Irish descent and had arrived in America just two years before he was born.  His mother ran a tobacco shop which was on the Long Wharf pier at the port.  His father, who was also a tobacconist, suffered from poor health and went to the West Indies around about the time of his son’s birth in the hope that the warmer climate may help,  but he died there in 1748, although the actual year of his death is contested.   His mother remarried when Copley was 10.  She married the engraver, painter, and schoolmaster Peter Pelham and it was believed that he gave young John Copley his first artistic tuition.   Pelham made his living by selling his portraits and engravings and even ran evening classes in arithmetic and writing as well as a dance class.  Another tutor of Copley was the Scottish born portrait painter John Smybert who had left his homeland and had come to America in 1826.  Both Copley’s tutors died when he was just thirteen years of age and so his artistic tuition was handed over to Joseph Blackburn, an English portrait painter, who had left home and worked in Bermuda and in colonial America.  Blackburn worked in Boston and eventually set up a studio in the town.  Although this master-student partnership started well it ended in acrimony.  The master (Blackburn) realised his student (Copley) was becoming a far better artist than himself and jealousy ended the arrangement. 

Boy with a Squirrel by John Singleton Copley (1765)

In 1776 Copley had sent his painting, entitled Boy with a Squirrel, to London, for the Society of Artists Exhibition.  The painting featured his step-brother, Henry Pelham with his pet squirrel.  It was the first work of art painted in America to be exhibited abroad and it was well received by the critics and on the strength of this work he was made a Fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain.  Benjamin West, the American artist who had moved to London in 1763,  invited Copley to do as he had done and move to Europe to continue his artistic studies.  For Copley, the invite was tempting and in some ways made him more unhappy with his present situation.  He was aware of his talent and the lack of artistic stimulation in Boston.  In the book Letters & Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776, there is one letter which Copley wrote to the American artist, Benjamin West:

“…In this Country as You rightly observe there is no examples of Art, except what is to [be] met with in a few prints indifferently executed, from which it is not possible to learn much…”

However although the invite to leave America was tempting Copley was aware that his portraiture was selling well and he had a good standard of living, mixing with the aristocracy who were his patrons and so he decided to stay in Boston and wrote back to Benjamin West in 1768 explaining his reasons:

“…I should be glad to go to Europe, but cannot think of it without a very good prospect of doing as well there as I can here. You are sensable that 300 Guineas a Year, which is my present income, is a pretty living in America. . . . And what ever my ambition may be to excel in our noble Art, I cannot think of doing it at the expence of not only my own happyness, but that of a tender Mother and a Young Brother whose dependance is intirely upon me…”

Susanna Farnham Clarke (Mrs Susanna Copley) by John Singleton Copley

However, although not wanting to move to England himself, he continued to send his art work to London where his artistic reputation was on the rise.   In 1769 John Copley married Susanna Farnham Clarke, whose father was one of the richest Boston merchants and a very wealthy and powerful business man, the Boston agent for the prestigious Honourable East India Company.   Copley and his wife were very happy and his wife’s beauty was portrayed in a number of her husband’s paintings.  The Copley’s marriage lasted for forty-five years and they went on to have six children.
Copley’s early works were in oils but he then began to dabble with pastels.  By the age of nineteen Copley had built up a reputation as an outstanding portraitist.  However Copley wanted to branch out and tackle historical paintings which at the time were very popular and the market for them was excellent.  Copley’s family connections and his wife’s relatives were Loyalists, staunch supporters of British Colonial rule.  Copley’s father-in-law was the merchant to whom the cargo of tea was consigned which sparked the infamous Boston Tea Party in December 1773 and this incident and what followed drove Susanna Clarke’s father to the brink of bankruptcy.

The unstable political climate worsened by the day, leading in 1774 to the rise of patriotism and the birth of the Patriots, the supporters of the colonists of the British Thirteen United Colonies who would within eighteen months rebel against British control.  Copley’s lucrative work started to dry up and it was because of his fear of an oncoming war that Copley decided to take up Benjamin West’s invitation to come to England.  His clear intention was to return to America as soon as the troubles were over, at a time when there would be a resurgence of his once-thriving art business and he would be looked upon once again as America’s leading portrait painter.  He set sail for England from Boston on June 1st 1774 leaving his mother, wife and children in the care of his step brother, Henry Pelham.  Copley had fully intended to return soon to America but the long and bloody War of Independence which eventually broke out in 1775 forced him to postpone his return. After the war ended, Copley financial situation no longer permitted a return, and the painter ended up staying in Britain forever.

On his arrival in England in 1774 Copley sought out Benjamin West who introduced him to Sir Joshua Reynolds both of whom were founder members of the Royal Academy of Art.  Copley set off in September of that year on a nine month European tour taking in Paris before moving to Italy and from there journeying north into Germany and the Low Countries.  In 1775 whilst still in Europe, Copley became alarmed at the deteriorating political situation in America and for the safety of his family.  In a letter to his step brother, Henry Pelham, he wrote:

“…if the Frost be severe and the Harbour frozen, the Town of Boston will be exposed to an attack;  and if it should be taken all that have remained in the town will be considered as enemies to the Country and ill treated or exposed to great distress…”   

Having also been alarmed about the situation at home, Copley’s wife and children, unbeknown to her husband,  had already left Boston at the end of May 1775 and arrived in London where they stayed with her brother-in-law.  Her father and her brothers followed shortly after.  Copley returned from his European trip and he and his wife set up home in London where Copley remained for the rest of his life.  By the start of the nineteenth century, life for Copley the artist, was becoming problematic.  He was still painting but sales were declining probably due to the Napoleonic Wars.  The house his family were living in was expensive to run and the cost of putting his son, John Jnr. through law school was proving costly.  The problem for Copley was that he couldn’t equate the fall of his earning power with the necessity to rein back his expenditure.  He became very depressed with life and by 1810 his health was concerning those around him.  At a dinner party in August 1815 Copley suffered a stroke and although he seemed to be recovering, he suffered a second seizure the following month and died in September 1815, aged 77.

On his death, Copley was deep in debt and his barrister son, John, who would later become Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, had to settle his father’s financial affairs, maintain his parents home and look after his mother, Susanna, until she died in 1836.

In My Daily Art Display today I am featuring the large oil on canvas painting entitled The Copley Family, by John Singleton Copley, which he completed in 1777 and is now housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  It measures 184cms x 229 cms (72 inches x 90 inches).  He started this group portrait painting a year after his family had arrived from America and settled in London and shortly after he himself had returned from his artistic tour of Europe.  Although an accomplished portraitist, this was the first time Copley had executed a group portrait.  The figures are almost life-size and his talent as a portraitist ensure that they all have a life-like appearance.

Copley himself is seen standing at the back of the family group grasping a sheaf of sketches and stares out at us in a manner which gives the impression that he is about to introduce the members of the Copley family to us.  Copley’s father-in-law, the once prosperous merchant, Richard Clarke is seated on the left of the painting, stern-faced avoiding our gaze, holding the youngest of his grand-daughters, Susanna.  To the right of the painting we see Copley’s wife Susanna, cradling her son John.  Look at how Copley has captured the look of love and tenderness in his wife’s face as she gazes down at her son.  On the far right of the painting and to his wife’s left, her daughter, Mary, vies for her attention.  Standing upright and in a formal pose is Copley’s eldest child, his daughter Elizabeth.  It is interesting to note that in those days boys wore dresses like their sisters until they were about six or seven years of age and old enough to wear breeches.

Copley had decided on the setting of the painting so as to give an air of classical refinement.  He has achieved that by the inclusion in the painting of elegant and fashionable furnishings and as we look over the shoulders of his sitters we see the ancient and classical Arcadian landscape à la Claude Lorrain and this background setting could well have come from paintings Copley had seen during his travel around Italy.  This group portrait of a family is of greater intimacy as it is the father who has lovingly depicted the scene.

Bronze statue of John Singleton Copley in Copley Park, Boston

John Singleton Copley’s hometown Boston has memorialised their artist by naming a city square after him, Copley Square, located in the Back Bay district of the city.  The square-shaped park at the centre is a mass of greenery and on the north side is the bronze statue of the artist.

The Sharples Family

My Daily Art Display today is not about a single painting but about a talented artistic family of English portrait painters.  This was a veritable dynasty of artists of the highest quality.  The head of the family was James Sharples who was born in Lancashire around 1751.  Originally his family had intended that James should study for the Catholic priesthood and he was sent to France for his initial training.   The theological path that his parents had wanted him to follow was not for James and he returned to England.    Instead James followed his chosen profession, that of an artist. At the age of twenty-eight, whilst living in Cambridge, he had four of his pictures accepted for the 1779 Royal Academy Exhibition.  Two years later he moved to Bath where he set himself up as a portrait painter and art teacher.

He and his first wife had a son, George.  Little is known of him but it is thought he could have also been an artist as in the 1815 Royal Academy Exhibition there was a painting by a “G Sharples of London”.  With his second wife James fathered a second son, Felix who eventually came to live with James and his third wife Ellen Wallace.  Ellen Wallace, who was of French extraction, lived in Bath and came from a Quaker family.   She was born in 1769 and was eighteen years younger than James.  They had met whilst she was attending one of his art classes.   James and Ellen Sharples married in 1787 and went on to have two children of their own, James Jnr. born in 1788 and Rolinda born in 1793, both of whom became artists.

George Washington by James Sharples (1796)

Around 1794 James, his wife Ellen and the three children, James, Felix and Rolinda set off for America.  It is thought that James believed that in America it would be possible to make a good living by painting portraits of the leading American figures of the time.  The sea voyage did not go to plan as their ship, according to Ellen Sharples’ diaries, was captured by a French privateer and James and the family were taken to Brest where they were kept prisoners for seven months.  The following year they were eventually released and continued on with their voyage to America, and eventually arrived in New York.   Sharples started working in New York and Philadelphia, which was the then seat of government and a place full of eminent people, including local and national politicians.  It is known that in the execution of his work Sharples  made us of an instrument known as a physiognotrace.  This was a device which was designed to trace a person’s profile in the form of a silhouette.

Slowly but surely, Sharples built up commissions for his portraiture.  The whole family then embarked on a painting tour of New England picking up lucrative commissions which often entailed making reasonably priced copies of his original portraits of American political leaders, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams.   Around 1797 when the family was living in Philadelphia, Ellen Sharples  began to draw portraits professionally.   At this time, there was a  great demand for reasonably priced copies and Ellen’s career of copying her husband’s original portraits on commission flourished and she could command virtually the same price for her miniatures as her husband charged for his mini-portraits. It was not just the mother and father who had artistic talents as their three children under their parents’ tutelage soon became accomplished artists in their own right and were soon able to contribute work for the family business.  Portraiture in America at that time was highly competitive not only because of home-grown American artists but more so from European painters who, like Sharples, had travelled to America in search of their fortune.   This intense competition made it necessary for artists to travel and look for clients rather than wait at home for clients to come knocking upon their doors.   James Sharples often had to drag his family from place to place in search of commissions.

James and Ellen Sharples soon built up reputations as talented portraitists who concentrated on small scale pastel portraits and whose work was in great demand and slowly but surely they became financially secure.  James Sharples died of heart trouble in 1811, aged 60 and Ellen and her two children, James and Rolinda returned to England.  Felix Sharples, who was at this time twenty-five years old, chose to stay in America, working as a portrait artist, where he died in 1830 aged 44.

Charles and Catherine Darwin by Ellen Sharples (1816)

Ellen, along with James and Rolinda settled down in Clifton, just outside Bristol and the three of them set up a family business producing small-scale pastel portraits for clients. Rolinda Sharples began to work in oils and she moved away from being a miniaturist and ventured into the highly competitive world of full-scale portraiture and history paintings depicting groups of people.  Rolinda was elected an honorary member of the Society of British Artists in 1927 and was one of the first female artists to attempt multi-figure compositions, which formed part of the pictorial historical records of the time.

The Stoppage of The Bank by Rolinda Sharples (1831)

The painting above entitled The Stoppage of the Bank by Rolinda Sharples was completed in 1831.   The background to this painting relates to the happenings in 1825 when England had just recovered from the Napoleonic Wars and the country’s economy started to boom.   In the euphoria of this boom, even the most clear-headed of  bankers made risky loans ( a familiar story ??).  The bubble burst in April 1825 and the stock market crashed.   By the autumn a number of country banks had failed causing panic.   It was a financial catastrophe, which led to widespread ruin and misery for the unfortunate people who had all their capital invested in the failed banks.  This is the setting, which Rolinda Sharples illustrates in her painting.   The scene before us takes place in a fictional street, called Guinea Street but which had a great similarity to the real Corn Street in Bristol.   On the right of the painting is a bank whose closure is causing shock and consternation to the people waiting outside attempting to get their money.  Behind, we see the famous Dutch House which stood on the corner of Wine Street and High Street until destroyed in the Blitz. The church in the centre background is All Saints Church.  Rolinda Sharples used some artistic licence when she placed the church in that position, one presumes it was for artistic effect.

The Artist and her Mother by Rolinda Sharples (c.1820)

Both Rolinda and her brother James predeceased their mother.  Rolinda died of breast cancer in 1838, just forty-five years of age and James Jr. died of tuberculosis in 1839.  Ellen Sharples, the last of the Sharples family, died in 1849 aged 80.

Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Watching by Gaugin

Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch by Gaugin (1892)

Paul Gaugin – Part 3 (Conclusion)

 Today I am concluding my look at the life of Paul Gaugin.  My earlier blogs on February 23rd and February 25th looked at the early and middle part  of Gaugin’s life and should probably be read before you begin today’s offering.

We had reached 1887 and left Gaugin desperately wanting to leave France and head for Panama where he believed he would be able to lead a worry-free lifestyle.  He and his artist friend Charles Laval set sail in April of that year and before reaching Colon in Panama the ship weighed anchor off the island of Martinique.  They eventually arrived at Colon and Gaugin was disappointed not only with the area but also that his plea to his brother-in-law for financial assistance was turned down.  Gaugin and Laval now had insufficient money to return to their newly chosen destination, Martinique.  It was then imperative that they found the funds from another source to pay for their proposed sea passage and so they worked on the construction of the Panama Canal.  The French had made the first attempt to construct a sea-level canal in 1880 under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps who had been involved in the construction of the Suez Canal some twenty five years earlier.  Gaugin and Laval finally accrued enough money for their trip to Martinique in June.   The Gods however didn’t look favourably on the two intrepid artists for whilst on the island of Martinique both Gaugin and Laval were extremely ill suffering from bouts of malaria and dysentery.  The pair returned to Paris in November 1887.  Despite his illness during his sojourn on Martinique, Gaugin believed his short time on the island was a defining moment in his life.  He wrote enthusiastically about it in a letter to his wife, Mette, in February 1888:

“…you must remember that I have a dual nature, the Indian and the sensitive civilised man.  The latter has disappeared [since my departure], which permits the former to take the lead…. the sensitive man has disappeared, which permits the Indian to forge resolutely ahead…”

Although he did not complete many paintings whilst at Martinique due to illness, what he brought back to Paris was remarkable and well received.  Gaugin lodged once again with the Schuffenecker family in Paris and struck up a friendship with Theo van Gogh, who worked as an art dealer for his family business at the Goupil Gallery.  Theo took on Gaugin on the strength of these Martinique works of art.  Theo’s brother Vincent van Gogh invited Gaugin to join him in Arles so that together they could set up and artistic colony and art institution which Vincent termed “A Studio in the South”.  Gaugin was disinclined to join Van Gogh on this project but Theo paid him to go to Arles to keep an eye on his brother.  In October 1888 Gaugin travelled south to Arles and stayed with Vincent van Gogh in the Yellow House.  The two artists were incompatible and within two months, and after many violent arguments, Gaugin left Vincent and returned to the Schuffenecker household in Paris.  Of his disagreements with van Gogh, Gaugin wrote in a letter that December to a fellow artist, Émile Bernard:

“….Vincent and I don’t agree on much, and especially not on painting….. He is romantic, whereas I, I am more inclined to a primitive state…”

 Van Gogh and Gaugin had a different philosophy to their art.  Van Gogh liked to have the subject he was painting in front of him whilst Gaugin preferred to paint from visions in his mind.  Once again we see Gaugin talking about his alter ego, that of him being the primitive man.

By 1889 the curse of wanderlust struck Gaugin again and this was heightened by his visit to the Exposition Universelle, the World Fair held in Paris that year.  Within the exhibition there were many stands highlighting the beauty and opportunities of the overseas French colonies.  Gaugin believed he could set off for one of these far-flung territories along with some of his artistic friends and set up a Studio of the Tropics.  Initially Gaugin favoured going to the French colony of Tonkin, which is now part of Vietnam or maybe go to Madagascar but finally he decided on Tahiti. Another reason for Gaugin to leave France could well have been that his preferred art dealer, Theo van Gogh,  who had managed to sell many of his works, suffered a mental breakdown and  died suddenly in January 1891 and with him went Gaugin’s main source of income.

In March 1891 Gaugin finally had agreement with the French government to sponsor his trip to Tahiti and in return for a reduced cost of the sea passage, he would record the customs, landscape and people in his paintings of the French colony.  Before he set sail he went to Copenhagen to see his wife and children and unbeknown to him at the time, it would be the last time he sees them.  Gaugin set off from Marseille on April 1st and arrived in the Tahitian port of Papeete on June 9th.   The Tahiti that Gaugin finds was not the Tahiti he had envisaged.  This was not the land of plenty which the Exposition Universal had described.  Tahiti was a down-at-heel French colony and Gaugin believed the native Tahitians had been ruined by missionary zeal.  What he had expected to see just did not exist.

His first works after he settled in Papeete were portraits of Tahitian women demurely dressed in their “Sunday-best” clothes but the demand from France was paintings of the pure full-blooded naked primitive native women.  They neither wanted to see depictions of the missionary-converted women, nor did they want to see the mixed race women, the product of their parents’ relationship with passing sailors.  Gaugin decided that if he was to find the true spirit of Tahiti he must move out of the colonial capital of Papeete and so along with his young mistress he went to Mataiea and away from the colonial influence of the capital.  He now felt much happier and in a letter to George-Daniel de Montfeid, the French artist, art collector and biographer of Gaugin, he wrote:

“…I am now living the life of a savage, walking around naked except for the essentials that women don’t like to see (or so they say)…”

Gaugin remained in Tahiti but his lack of money and hand-to-mouth existence was affecting his health and he became depressed and hankered to return to France but the Governor of the Island refused to let him leave.  In the spring of 1893, he sent a number of his Tahitian paintings to de Montfreid to be exhibited and sold.  In the autumn of 1893 he finally managed to leave the island and returned to Paris where he fully expected to be acclaimed a hero for all the Tahitian works of art he had sent home.  His works were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris and although they were well received by critics, sales were disappointing.

In the spring of 1894 he revisits Pont Aven with his very young Javanese mistress.  Gaugin had returned to this artist colony, not as a respectable gentleman artist but as the uncouth primitive savage, a persona which he had developed during his Tahitian stay.  His constant fornication with very young and under-age girls earned him a certain notoriety and his heavy drinking bouts often lead to fights with the locals and on one occasion his ankle was shattered causing him to be laid up for more than half a year.  In early 1895 he received his come-uppance for his unrestrained debauchery over the years when he was diagnosed as having contracted syphilis.  He is completely disillusioned with France and he sold as many of his paintings as he could and left the shores of France for the last time and headed back to Tahiti.

Life back in Tahiti was not kind to the ageing artist.  To his great disgust, the country had become more modern.  His health was slowly but steadily deteriorating due to the onset of the symptoms of syphilis.  His financial situation worsened and in 1897 he suffered a series of heart attacks. He also received the sad news from his wife Mette that his daughter Aline had died of pneumonia in Copenhagen, at the age of 20.   In the early months of 1898, in a moment of complete despair, he went into the mountains and attempted to kill himself with arsenic.  It does not kill him but badly damaged his internal organs and he had to be often hospitalised to stabilise his condition.  More bad news from home was to follow as his third and favourite child, Clovis, died in 1900 aged just 21.

In 1902 he moves from Tahiti to Atuona on Hiva-Oa in the remote Marquesas Islands where he died the following year of syphilitic heart failure, just a few weeks short of his fifty-fifth birthday.

My Daily Art Display featured oil on burlap painting today was completed by Gaugin in 1892 during his first stay in Tahiti and is entitled Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Watching and is housed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.  Manao tupapau is the spirit of the dead.  The painting is a mass of colour, the yellow blanket, the black and gold valance and the phosphorescent greenish sparks on the violet background, which exaggerate the creepy atmosphere.     This is a highly atmospheric and sensuous scene, full of mystery and foreboding.  Fear emanates from the painting.  Gaugin explained his thought process when he painted this picture:

“…I have made a nude of a young girl… who is a Maori. These people traditionally fear the spirits of the dead… I must explain this fear with as few of the time-honoured literary devices as possible… there are a few flowers in the background but… as they only exist in the girl’s imagination… I make them like sparks… finally I have made the ghost just a plain little woman, for this girl… can only picture the spirits of the dead as looking like the person who has died…”

Gauguin in choosing the face-down pose of the young naked girl knew it could be highly problematic when it was seen by the French public and of course it was these very people who would be the potential buyers of his art.    He must have been fully aware that his depiction of the young girl would strongly hint at lovemaking, which had just occurred or was about to happen.  It is interesting to note that very few paintings up until then depicted the naked body of a woman lying down.  The one well-known exception was probably the Reclining Girl by François Boucher (My Daily Art Display, May 30th 2011).   Not to be detracted from his desire for that pose Gaugin probably then decided to incorporate the “spirit of the dead” theme with the fear that came with it, so as to add some gravitas to the work.

We need to understand the thought process of the Tahitians when it came to life and death.  The Tahitians divide their day into two halves: daylight, or ao, and darkness, or po.  With po they associate the tupapaus, and therefore they fear the night.   The tupapaus are the Tahitian personifications of the spirits of death.  For the Tahitians they are a genuine and permanent threat to them and they associate them with the darkness of night.   The Tahitians are so afraid of them that they never go out of their homes at night without a light, and even with a light they never venture out alone. They always keep their homes lit at night, so as to ward off the tupapaus.

Before us we see a young dark-skinned Tahitian female as she lies naked, face down on her stomach on top of a bed with a stray tendril of her jet-black hair lying across the pillow.  She is probably in her early teens, Gaugin’s age of choice for his mistresses.  She exudes an abundance of sexuality. Her body retains some of the “puppy fat” of a young female.  There is firmness to her limbs and buttocks and a definite seductiveness about her pose, which of course was all in the mind of the artist.    Her body is stiff as if she dare not move an inch for fear of the repercussion of so doing, although one can imagine that inwardly she is shuddering with fear.  She is terrified by the presence of the hooded spirit of death with its averted phosphorescent-coloured eye, which we see sitting crouched at the foot of the bed.  For the young girl, death was not a strange occurrence as  European ships and the sailors  brought to the island diseases such as smallpox, dysentery, scarlet fever and tuberculosis for which Tahitians had little or no immunity.  Add to this the weapons the sailors brought with them to the island to ttrade for food and which provided the natives with a much more effective killing machine during local rival confrontations.  She has witnessed death through disease and local confrontations many times over and by his depiction of this scene and despite its exotic colouring, Gaugin is, in a way,  commenting on the fragility of Tahitian life.

It is as if the spirit is keeping a vigil at the foot of the bed.  Maybe the girl believes the spirit has come to take her to the “next world”.  Native Polynesians believed that the phosphorescence of the light was the spirits of the dead.  The hag-like spirit with bulbous lips is seen in profile and the face and eye reminds me of Ancient Egyptian drawings of women.  The hand of the evil spirit lies menacingly on the bed.  In this case the spirit is the embodiment of an old woman dressed in a black shawl but for the frightened girl she is probably the embodiment of a dead relative who may have come for her.   In his 1901 book entitled Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, Gaugin recalled the incident.  He had just returned home unexpectedly late one night.  The room was in darkness.  He struck a match and saw his wife, Tehura……

“…immobile, naked, lying face downward on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear . . . Might she not with her frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?…”

It is a remarkable painting and for me the story behind it adds to its appeal.

That ends my look at Gaugin and his life and I wonder what you think of him as a man and as an artist.  The two are quite different.  Such differences between the personality of a person and the quality of what he or she  produces have always existed and still do nowadays.  So should we just take in and enjoy what Gaugin has produced and put to the back of our minds his way of life and his proclivity for sex with under-age girls or is that just too difficult?  By compartmentalising Gaugin’s lifestyle and Gaugin’s art work, are we simply justifying the unjustifiable?