Paul Gauguin

Another Ironical Note For Paul Gauguin

MORE than 60 years ago, Paul Gauguin watched a bronze skinned Tahitian chopping wood on a beach. Nearby a woman was arranging fishing-nets in a canoe, and beyond stretched the lagoon and a line of foam-smothered reef.

Gauguin (1848-1903), the respect able bourgeois bank clerk who had abandoned his rigidly conventional life in Paris to become a penniless painter, first in Brittany and then in Tahiti, transferred the scene to canvas.

Like most of his work, the paint ing was decorative post-impression ism, with bold colouring and con tours, and the scene was one that he recorded several times.

Back in France, in 1895, Gauguin put the painting up for sale. It brought so little that the indignant artist bought it back.

It went to a dealer when he re turned to the South Seas, and when he died, destitute, in the Marquesas eight years later it had disappeared.

Gauguin dead is Gauguin appre ciated, and in 1954 there was con siderable excitement when his Man With An Axe was discovered to be in the possession of a French family who had bought it 57 years ago.

To-day, owned by an American vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, Mr Alex Lewyt, it is valued at 1,500 times the sum first paid for it in 1895. And that works out at about £75.000 (Australian).

tl Mr. D. S. Marshall, anthropologist and student of Polynesian langu ages, has recently been carrying out research in Tahiti and the Cook Islands. He is an associate of Harvard University and is attached to the Peabody Museum at Salem, Massachusetts.

In addition to his other studies, he is making a comparative study of 60 Polynesian dialects. In one of his lectures given at Rarotonga he demonstrated how the great Polynesian migrations can be traced, and how the Polynesians’ length of residence in the Pacific Islands can be determined, by the study of their dialects.