The National Gallery’s exhibition of Gauguin’s portraits reveals the French painter’s self-obsession

“I felt that these pictures had something to say to me that was very important for me to know, but I could not tell what it was … I fancy that Strickland saw some vaguely spiritual meaning in material things that was so strange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols. It was as though he had found in the chaos of the universe a new pattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul, to set it down.”

This is how the narrator of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence responded to his first encounter with the work of the novel’s painter hero, Charles Strickland, based on Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). The book came out in 1919, just 16 years after the artist’s death, but the myth of the Paris stockbroker-turned-painter who left behind the comforts of Western civilisation for an Edenic existence in French Polynesia was already powerful enough to draw Maugham to the South Seas for the first time.

Today Gauguin’s name is indelibly linked with the image of a tropical paradise he created after leaving France for Tahiti in 1891. By the standards of his artistic contemporaries his pictures, as Maugham suggested, do seem clumsily painted, but their effect is the more powerful for that. Great artists are formed by their limitations as much as by their gifts and Gauguin, having come to painting late, never convincingly mastered the modelling of 3-D form. But he made a virtue of his paintings’ flatness by presenting them as contemporary icons full of spiritual meaning.