Volume 6, Number 12 · July 7, 1966
Gauguin's Arcadia
By Francis Haskell
Gauguin in the South Seas
by Bengt Danielsson
Doubleday, 336 pp., $7.95
The speculations of Diderot and Rousseau, followed by the discoveries of Captain Cook, seemed at last to give some precise geographical location, some substance, to those dreams of Arcadia which for so long had haunted the imaginations of Western man. The shortest excursion to the countryside round Paris and London, or even Rome and Athens, was enough to show how far this was from being the paradise of erotic leisure so beautifully and so treacherously portrayed by Virgil and Giorgione. But elsewhere that paradise existed. 'May the day come (and come soon perhaps)' wrote Gauguin—rather tactlessly—to his wife in 1890, 'when I will go to bury myself in the woods on some South Sea Island, and live there in ecstasy, peace, and art, surrounded by a new family, far from the European struggle for money. There in Tahiti, in the silence of beautiful tropical nights, I will be able to listen to the sweet murmuring music of the movements of my heart in loving harmony with the mysterious beings that surround me. Free at last, with no money troubles, I will be able to love, to sing and die.'
Review, 1614 words
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