In Magpie mystic of the South Pacific, John Whitley summarizes tortured-artist Gaugin’s life:
Exactly 100 years ago next Thursday, Paul Gauguin died alone and in agonising pain in his shack on the Marquesas Islands near Tahiti. He was 54, heavily in debt, his paintings were almost universally derided and he was addicted to morphine — he may even have been killed by an overdose of the drug, which he took for the suppurating syphilis sores on his legs.
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Raised among distant cousins in Peru, he returned to France for a formal education, then roamed the world as a merchant seaman. At 25 he married and settled down on the stock exchange, devoting his spare time to studies with friendly Impressionists, notably his mentor, Camille Pissarro, and Degas. Hit by the 1882 crash, he threw it all up to become a full-time artist, but poverty drove him to the cheaper artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany and then to Arles. There he may (or may not) have incited Van Gogh to hack off his ear.