Art
[PAUL GAUGUIN.]
THE Dtirrio collection of works by Gauguin, which is on view at the Leicester Galleries, is thoroughly worth a visit. There are only a few oil paintings, but water-colours, drawings, wood-engravings and lithographs are here in profusion. Francisco Durrio, to whom this collection belonged formerly, was an extremely close friend of Gauguin, and it was on his suggestion that Gauguin went to Tahiti. Senor Durrio came into possession of these pictures just before Gauguin's second visit to the tropics.
It is strange to-day to look back upon the indignation which both he and his unhappy friend Vincent van Gogh aroused. In his Intimate Journals he refers to an incident at Copenhagen where he was invited by a certain gentleman in the name of a Donici Art Club to hold an exhibition of his work. Gauguin did not go till the afternoon of the opening day, but when he arrived he found that the exhibition had been closed !
The Gauguin legend—much better known than his pictures —is not quite true. A middle-aged, respectable stockbroker, with a wife and three children to whom he was devoted, suddenly between dark and dawn stepped out of all the domestic virtues like an old pair of trousers ! Behold a new man who burned with the desire to paint ! He went to Paris and painted as he would regardless of academic tradition. Then, finding civilization intolerable, he fled to Tahiti, where he painted barbaric pictures, went after barbaric loves and died like a flower-crowned barbarian I It is a splendid story, but, alas, it is only a magnificent souffle raised on the chicken breasts of fact I Among the oils in the present show is the Portrait of the Artist's Mother, painted from memory at Paris in 1898— twenty-seven years after her death—and a small study for the large picture in the Volkow Collection—Enfants Lutteurs. There are a number of exquisite pencil drawings and example of the Brittany period as well as that of the South Seas. Admirers of Gauguin's work will be particularly interested in the series of extraordinarily rare woodcuts—mostly early states—and in the set of ten lithographs on yellow paper. It is not perhaps as glowing and spectacular a show as one might expect, but its interest from the point of view of the student of Paul Gauguin is unlimited.
DAVID FINCIIABI.
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