Wild Thing: A Life Of Paul Gauguin

Description

Gorgeously illustrated with 70 colour images

You wish to teach me what is within myself: learn first what is within you . . . I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.

In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity.

Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.

Promotion info

 A vital re-examination of the trailblazing and controversial artist Paul Gauguin, by the prize-winning author of I Am Dynamite!

Awards

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2025

Reviews

'Scintillating.' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Immaculate.' NEW STATESMAN
'Phenomenal.' PROSPECT
'A heroic rehabilitation.' THE TIMES

Author description

Sue Prideaux's first biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (2005) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strindberg: A Life (2012) won the Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and was The Times Biography of the Year.