![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/air-mail.png\"\/)
<\/p>\nWild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux <\/p>\n
Sue Prideaux\u2019s Wild Thing is wise, engaging\u2014and the first biography I\u2019ve read that elects to disprove rumors of syphilis on its preface\u2019s opening page. (Thanks to forensic testing of four of Paul Gauguin\u2019s \u201cheavily\u201d decayed teeth. As if to ensure maximum indignity, they were found in an old jar he evidently liked to drink from.) Poor Gauguin, that it should come to this, more than 120 years after his death, alone, half blind, and racked with pain, in French Polynesia.<\/p>\n
Gauguin\u2019s family certainly didn\u2019t advertise or champion convention. His father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist, and his French-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Tristan, published her diaries under the title\u2014as Gauguin might have called his own journals\u2014Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). She wrote the socialist tract The Workers\u2019 Union (1843) and became, in Prideaux\u2019s words, \u201can icon of the French feminist movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Enter your e-mail to read the full story for free and to receive our weekly e-mail newsletter<\/p>\n
Or, subscribe<\/a> to AIR MAIL and receive access to all of our content. And for one weekend only, you can get 50% off your first year during our Flash Subscription Sale!<\/p>\n \n Or subscribe to AIR MAIL<\/a> for full access. Start your free trial today.\n <\/p>\n