Author Talk: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin with Sue Prideaux

If you google Paul Gauguin you’ll see he comes second in the most famous post-Impressionist painters, after Cézanne but before van Gogh. It’s little known that van Gogh painted his famous Sunflowers to hang in Gauguin’s bedroom ‘as a big welcome bouquet’ when Gauguin accepted his invitation to come and paint with him in Arles. They made great paintings together, but it ended disastrously when van Gogh, whose mania had been spiralling, cut off his ear. This is only one of the astonishing incidents in Gauguin’s life, which was as adventurous and as colourful as his art. Running wild as a child in Peru, suffocated by a strict Catholic education in France, fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, experiencing great riches and great poverty, digging the Panama Canal and travelling to Tahiti in the assumption of sand, sea and sex but turning instead into a political campaigner on behalf of the Polynesian people. Wild Thing draws on new discoveries to tell a fascinating tale of a richly complicated life. 

Wild Thing is Sue’s fourth biography – the previous three have all won important literary prizes, and her most recent I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche was translated into thirty-two languages and was The Times’ Biography of the Year.  

‘The best biographies shouldn’t succumb to binary tellings of good or evil . . . What makes Prideaux’s new biography of Gauguin so good—and one of the best—is that it deftly avoids such pitfalls. Based on newly unearthed material, including a memoir Gauguin himself wrote near his death in 1903, Wild Thing is an engrossing ride through all the major currents of the artist’s life . . . Prideaux has succeeded—stunningly—in her task. An extraordinary artist, an extraordinary life, a phenomenal book.’  David McAllister, Prospect.