Paul Gauguin by John Gould Fletcher — Read

With the return of Gauguin to Paris there opened for him the second stage of his career, the struggle to maintain himself on the productions of his brush and chisel. During the first stage his character had been formed by the hard experiences of seafaring and by the comparative leisure and affluence of his epoch of splendor, during which he found time to discuss the principles of art with the best exponents of the latest French tradition. He had not only met and talked with men like Manet, Pissarro, and Cezanne, he also visited the museums of Paris, and did not confine himself to the Louvre, but made a special study of the Musee Guimet with its collection of art works from the far East, and later of the Trocadero, with its casts of Cambodian sculpture. His stay at Bertin's had been of good service in giving him the mental equipment, the self-education necessary to begin the struggle for artistic independence.

Yet in his case we know far less of what passed in his mind during these important years of development than in the case of most of his contemporaries. "He was the sort of man to be awake to everything new in art that was going on," says one who knew him in this period, "but not to acknowledge indebtedness to anything or anybody. " What he absorbed was by instinct; and instinct cautioned him not to share his knowledge with people who might fail to make good use of it.