References to Gauguin paintings in Somerset Maugham’s The moon and sixpence

As most readers will be aware, and as Maugham himself belatedly acknowledged in his 1933 preface, The moon and sixpence (1919; see Maugham 1968) is loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin. What might be less obvious is that references in the novel to paintings produced by its fictional anti-hero, the artist Charles Strickland, clearly suggest either specific works by Gauguin or generic phases in his artistic development. This playful writerly co-option of actual paintings to represent the output of a fictional artist bears importantly on the novel’s imaginative realisation and complicates its interpretation. For a readership familiar with Gauguin’s life and art, awareness that Maugham is gesturing towards specific works by Gauguin has a twofold effect. A level of painterly verisimilitude is established which is difficult to ignore in responding to the novel. Secondly, a disturbing and unavoidable sense of cognitive and artistic dissonance is set up, in that the reader struggles to accept that the surly, inarticulate, impassioned but utterly joyless and grim figure of Charles Strickland could ever have produced the luscious, entrancing and mythically dense paintings seen in much of Gauguin’s oeuvre.


Introduction
As most readers will be aware, and as Maugham himself belatedly acknowledged in his 1933 preface, The moon and sixpence (1919; see Maugham 1968) is loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin. What might be less obvious is that references in the novel to paintings produced by its fictional anti-hero, the artist Charles Strickland, clearly suggest either specific works by Gauguin or generic phases in his artistic development. This playful writerly co-option of actual paintings to represent the output of a fictional artist bears importantly on the novel's imaginative realisation and complicates its interpretation. For a readership familiar with Gauguin's life and art, awareness that Maugham is gesturing towards specific works by Gauguin has a twofold effect. A level of painterly verisimilitude is established which is difficult to ignore in responding to the novel. Secondly, a disturbing and unavoidable sense of cognitive and artistic dissonance is set up, in that the reader struggles to accept that the surly, inarticulate, impassioned but utterly joyless and grim figure of Charles Strickland could ever have produced the luscious, entrancing and mythically dense paintings seen in much of Gauguin's oeuvre.
Gauguin was garrulously eloquent about both his works and their intent; Strickland has nothing whatever to say about his art. There is in consequence a 'dumbness', a discursive lacuna, at the heart of this novel dramatising, celebrating and ironising the supreme value of art. The reticence, It has not before been noticed that in describing works of art painted by his fictional anti-hero, Charles Strickland, in the novel The moon and sixpence, which is loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin, Somerset Maugham drew on actual works by Gauguin in his verbal descriptions. Sometimes the references are to specific paintings, at others to phases in his work. For readers familiar with Gauguin's artistic output, his writings on art and his biography, the effect of this insistent visual 'quotation' is to create a disturbing sense of aesthetic dissonance, in that it becomes difficult to accept the inarticulate, surly, impassioned but utterly grim and joyless figure of the fictional Charles Strickland as the source of these vivifying paintings, which possess their own real history and provenance. There is nothing in Strickland of Gauguin's child-like zest for life, his exuberance, his fantasies, his extrovert willingness to explain his art to friends and the public through fascinating if deeply unreliable writings. The reader must either attempt to blot all knowledge of Gauguin and his art from consciousness, thereby denying that Maugham is 'quoting' Gauguin's oeuvre, or else submit to an intolerable level of fictional incredulity and disbelief.

Verwysings na Gauguin se skilderye in Somerset Maugham se The moon and sixpence.
Dit is nog nie vantevore opgemerk dat in die beskrywings van die kunswerke deur die fiktiewe antiheld, Charles Strickland, in sy roman The moon and sixpence (losweg gebaseer op die lewe van Paul Gauguin), Somerset Maugham beskrywings van werklike kunswerke deur Gauguin gebruik het nie. Soms verwys hy na spesifieke skilderye, soms na fases in Gauguin se werk. Vir lesers wat Gauguin se kuns, sy skryfwerk oor sy kuns en sy biografie ken, skep dié knaend visuele 'aanhaling' 'n onthutsende estetiese dissonansie, omdat hulle moeilik kan aanvaar dat die woordarm, nors, passievolle maar onverbiddelik vreugdelose figuur van die fiktiewe Charles Strickland die bron kan wees van hierdie besielende kunswerke en hulle inspirerende geskiedenis. Strickland besit niks van Gauguin se uitgelate kinderlike lewenslus, sy fantasieë of sy uitbundige drif om fassinerende dog totaal onbetroubare uitsprake oor sy kuns teenoor sy vriende en die publiek te maak nie. Die leser moet óf al sy kennis van Gauguin en sy kuns uit sy bewussyn probeer vee, en daarmee ontken dat Maugham Gauguin se oeuvre aanhaal, óf 'n ondraaglike graad van skeptisisme en ongeloof aanvaar. who has lived in them they evoke memories of a kind of sensual content and a happiness of the spirit which the passing of time can never quite dim. (Maugham 1984:52) So, not much about Gauguin's paintings, a reaffirmation of interest in his life and character, and cool approbation for evoking a South Seas idyll in which Maugham can bask in his own memories. Of the impressionists, and in his early career Gauguin was an impressionist of sorts, Maugham clearly preferred Degas and Cézanne (Maugham 1984:53). But 20 years earlier, The moon and sixpence shows Maugham more than casually alert to Gauguin's output. In fact, with perhaps a touch of whimsy, he seems to have used Gauguin's paintings as an artistic backdrop to bolster his fictive sortie into a Gauguin-esque life story which interested him deeply, his own. The link to Maugham's personal history is belatedly revealed in the novel's closing lines, where the narrator abruptly introduces his readers to 'Uncle Harry, for twenty seven years Vicar of Whitstable' (Maugham 1984:252 Figure 3). 4 The strictures offered are those of Maugham's narrator, who takes Ingres as his touchstone for contemporary draftsmanship, and not necessarily those of the author. Certain focal pieces of fruit in the 1892 painting are indeed unsymmetrical, as is the supporting table, and a superficial glance might easily suggest that the wooden receptacle is also strangely distorted. This is the only container in any of Gauguin's still-lifes of oranges that could credibly be described as a 'plate' rather than a bowl. 5 The 'plate is not 4.Letter to Émile Schuffenecker, quoted in Rewald (1966:277 round' because it is a representation of one of the elongated, boat-shaped platters carved from a calabash or gourd, so common across the islands of the South Pacific, and the notion that Gauguin's oranges are unrealistically 'lop-sided' could only come from someone who has not looked closely at such fruit. In addition, the image 'maps' the elongated, panoramic format of the canvas on which it is painted. Maugham is gently satirising the visual inexperience of his narrator, whilst rehearsing typical historical responses to the subversiveness of post-impressionist art. In all, the visual cues suggest that Maugham may well have imaginatively appropriated Nature morte aux fruits et piments to represent Strickland's canvas.
In the same passage, further references to Strickland's paintings are generalised and do not evoke particular paintings, but point to specific phases in Gauguin's output: The portraits were a little larger than life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes the faces looked like caricatures. They were painted in a way that was entirely new to me. (p. 107) A look at Gauguin's portraits, especially the self-portraits, confirms this perception. See, for example, Self-portrait, 'to my friend Carrière' (1886, W384; Figure 4), seen in the Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1906, Self-portrait, 'Les misérables' (1888, W239; Figure 5) or Self-portrait in caricature (1889, W323; Figure 6).
There are several others in this monumental mode. The heads are deliberately disproportionate and earnest realism is abandoned in favour of something approaching a decorative cartoon, in the modern sense, aiming at a fleeting symbolist evocation of character and demeanour rather than strict visual realism. 'Ungainly' seems an appropriate word. The rendering is deliberately rough and gestural rather than painterly and polished. When Strickland undertakes a commissioned portrait 'of a retired plumber for two hundred francs' (p. 96) -there is no such work in Gauguin's oeuvre -Maugham is evoking the 'shocking' willingness of the early modernist artists to tackle 'low' subjects rather than bask in the long tradition of noble patronage, a democratic trend going back to the realists of the mid-century such as Courbet. At Arles both Gauguin and  Van Gogh had relished painting its mundane inhabitants, including the local postman, peasants and servants. It was all part of a revolutionary sense that the ordinary could be a fit subject for art. Of Strickland's landscapes, the narrator has this to say: The landscapes puzzled me even more. There were two or three pictures of the forest of Fontainebleau and several of streets to go out into the forest of Fontainebleau ... and paint direct from nature was in itself a protest, a statement that reality with all its flaws was more vital than the ordered antique dreamworld created in the studio.
Early realist canvases such as Sous-Bois (   The two Saint-Cloud paintings are plein air oil sketches in a restricted palette, the first rendered predominantly in brown and the second in green. The colouration in such canvases might well strike an uninformed viewer as 'extraordinarily crude'. If, as seems probable given his comments, Maugham's narrator's point of comparison would be the accomplished landscapes in oils of the English and Dutch schools, then his fictionalised reaction to the exhibition of such paintings is unsurprising, an appropriate response hinting at a conventional, oldfashioned visual education. Gauguin's Paris street scenes, mostly treating the area immediately round his home in the Rue Carcel, are unsurprising to 21st century eyes, but their spontaneous, almost improvised composition, reminiscent of Cézanne, could conceivably strike Maugham's narrator as aesthetically outré. Paintings such as Le jardin en hiver, rue Carcel (1883, W80; Figure 11), Un coin du jardin, rue Carcel (1881-1882, W73; Figure 12) and especially Jardin à Vaugirard (1881, W67; Figure 13) have an informality that might well give rise, in Maugham's fiction, to his narrator's sense of outrage.
The next crucial reference to one of Strickland's paintings is the tortured moment when, following his wife's death, the pathetic, egregious Dirk Stroeve (a character based partly on Gauguin's long-suffering friend, the painter Émile Schuffenecker) first looks at the canvas, a large nude, which Strickland has left in his (Stroeve's) studio, its face to the wall: It was the picture of a woman lying on a sofa, with one arm beneath her head and the other along her body; one knee was raised, and the other leg was stretched out.    painting despite the image in question being that of his own wife, who has betrayed him with Strickland, been used and abused by him, and in consequence committed suicide in the most ghastly way. Geoffrey Meyers (2004:xxiv) hazards a view that the description suggests Gauguin's 'Nevermore' (1897, W558; see Figure 14). Surely not. Blanche Stroeve's distinguishing visual characteristic is her paleness, echoing her first name (p. 76). She has brown hair and 'quiet grey eyes' (p. 76). The 'classic' pose described is that of Manet's Olympia (1863), the scandalous nude of the era, which Gauguin had himself copied (1891, W413; see Figure 15) and a photograph of which he kept with him in Tahiti (Brooks 1992:335).
The pose is classic in that it references works such as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510; see Figure 16), Cranach's Diana at Rest (1515; see Figure 17), of which Gauguin had a photograph (Crepaldi 1999:113), and Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538; see Figure 18); but in Manet's treatment, myth's traditional narrative charge has been stripped away and replaced by unflinching social truth. Just as the public had to be prevented from attacking Manet's bold image of an unmistakably real woman, a courtesan, staring out unashamedly at the viewer in flagrant challenge to social hypocrisy, so in Maugham's fiction poor Dirk Stroeve, confronted with a stark memento of his wife's betrayal,     Figure 19). Again, a clutch of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings seems apposite, rather than one particular image. The reference is generic.
The climax of Strickland's art is the final eerie fresco painted on the walls in two rooms of the house he shares with his Tahitian partner, Ata, and their children, outside Taravao, and which Dr Coutras describes as follows: The light was dim, and after the brilliant sunshine for a while he could see nothing. Then he gave a start. He could not make out      Later, Captain Bruno asks Dr Coutras to describe the painting further: 'What was the subject?' I asked.
'I scarcely know. It was strange and fantastic. It was a vision of the beginnings of the world, the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve -que sais-je? -it was a hymn to the beauty of the human form, male and female, and the praise of Nature, sublime, indifferent, lovely, and cruel. It gave you an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the endlessness of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every day, the coconuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the alligator pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as though there were in them a mystery which I am ever on the point of seizing and which for ever escapes me. The colours were colours familiar to me, and yet they were different. ... And those nude men and women. They were on the earth yet apart from it. They seemed to possess something of the clay of which they were created, and at the same time something divine. You saw man in the nakedness of his primeval instincts, and you were afraid, for you saw yourself. ' (pp. 241-242) Aside from the ubiquitous banyans, the specific trees and foliage mentioned by Maugham Figure 20).
This painting (139 x 375 cm), which richly assimilates some earlier elements and previews later ones in Gauguin's oeuvre, is the largest of his so-called 'Edenic friezes' (Cachin 1992:112). The work formed the centrepiece of the 1898 Vollard Gallery exhibition and it speaks to circumstances evoked in the novel in three ways. Firstly, the canvas is Gauguin's self-conscious effort to produce a culminating masterpiece (see Gauguin In looking at Strickland's painting Dr Coutras even feels an awkward affinity with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, which Maugham (1984:51) in 'Paintings I have liked' refers to as 'the most impressive piece of painting that exists in the world'; but any such similarity is immediately cancelled by the 'terror' and 'horror' he perceives in Strickland's work (Maugham 1984:242-243). Thirdly, the real painting and the fictional one are each closely associated with the artist's death. Gauguin It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not what; and at first sight it was an innocent picture enough. It would have been passed in an exhibition of the Post-Impressionists by a careless person as an excellent but not very remarkable example of the school. ... The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave. There were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly -one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children -and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove's breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can 8.Gauguin's supposed death from leprosy was an early fable, probably misinterpreting syphilitic sores. In his book Paul Gauguin: His life and art (1921), just too late for Maugham's purposes, John Gould Fletcher relied on a letter from Rev. Paul Vernier, the protestant pastor on the Marquesas who was in all probability the last person to see Gauguin alive, to list the maladies that accompanied the painter's passing. Fletcher (1921:n.p.) writes: 'It was not the eczema of the legs, nor leprosy, as some have hinted, nor another dose of arsenic, nor syphilis, that ended his life; it was a simple syncope of the heart'. For later corroboration, cf. Danielsson (1965:205-206).
tell what anguished fancy made these fruits? They belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides. There was something strangely alive in them, as though they were created in a stage of the world's dark history when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They were extravagantly luxurious. They were heavy with tropical odours. They seemed to possess a sombre passion of their own. It was enchanted fruit, to taste which might open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to mysterious palaces of the imagination. They were sullen with unawaited dangers, and to eat them might turn a man to beast or god. All that was healthy and natural, all that clung to happy relationships and the simple joys of simple men, shrunk from them in dismay; and yet a fearful attraction was in them, and, like the fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they were terrible with the possibilities of the unknown. (pp. 245-246) I have quoted this verbal extravaganza at length to lay before the reader evidence which leads me to suggest that the painting which most nearly fits its luxurious decadence is Gauguin's Cloisonnist canvas, Nature morte aux mangos et à la fleur d'hibiscus (1887, W555; see Figure 21).
Again, not all the fruits mentioned by the narrator, the French Captain René Brunot, are represented in the piece. Bananas in particular appear in only one of Gauguin's paintings, Le repas ou les bananes [The meal, or the bananas] (1891, W427, not illustrated), which is much more than a 'fruit-piece' and clearly not the painting evoked here. Another possibility would be Le Panier Carré (1899, W593; see Figure 22), which has been in the Norwegian National Gallery, Oslo, since 1916.
The location could be oddly significant since, as we have seen, in 'Paintings I have liked ' Maugham (1941:52) notes that 'I once wrote a fanciful description of a fruitpiece in the museum at Stockholm'. The passage from The moon and sixpence is the only one in Maugham's writings to which this remark could refer. Might he have muddled his memories of the Swedish and Norwegian galleries? Stockholm's National Museum has no such painting and never has had. Even so, looking at Le Panier Carré, it is difficult not to conclude that Nature morte aux mangos et à la fleur d'hibiscus fits Maugham's description rather better. The former has too much basket, more basket than 'pile'. This is apart from the fact that the sinister-looking bird seen sneaking fruit from the basket in Le Panier Carré is absent from Maugham's verbal fruit-piece. 10 Maugham's description is very much a self-conscious 'purple passage' -literally so -and suffers from over-ripe writing as much as the fruit it evokes. In consequence, and as a matter of deficient fictional technique, the fictional narrator's verbal deftness and prolixity, not to mention his intense aesthetic 10.The bird is probably the koao, the same bird seen gripped by a dog, Gauguin's habitual symbol of himself, in the bottom right-hand corner of another painting, The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa (1902, W616; see Figure 23).
concern, seem wildly out of character for Captain Brunot. Even so, accepting this, the colour palette described so fully is certainly present in the Gauguin canvas, whilst the sense of over-ripe visual excess and olfactory pungency fits the verbal description very well. The text gestures towards a Gauguin image of this kind, even if one remains unconvinced that a French Captain would harbour 'vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus' or digress so readily into descriptions of an English Christmas.
Two further mentions of fictionalised art merit discussion. At her home in London, Mrs Strickland cherishes a print by her errant husband which she regards as 'essentially decorative': Their eyes rested on a nude woman suckling a baby, while a girl was kneeling by their side holding out a flower to the indifferent child. Looking over them was a wrinkled, scraggy hag. It was Strickland's version of the Holy Family. I suspected that for the figures had sat his household above Taraveo, and the woman and the baby were Ata and his first son. I asked myself if Mrs. Strickland had any inking of the facts. (p. 249) The description suggests a conflation of three Gauguin paintings, Le'Offrande (1902, W624;Figure 24) and the very similar compositions Maternité 1 (1899, W581, not illustrated) and Maternité 11 (1899, W582; Figure 25).
The first has the nursing mother, the floral offering and the pre-occupied baby, whilst the two Maternité paintings offer something closer to the suggested composition. The third woman mentioned in the novel is described as 'wrinkled' and 'scraggy', presumably because she is Ata's aging mother.
All three canvases were probably on view in the 1903 Vollard exhibition, the first as Mére allaitant son enfant, number 2 in the catalogue, and the second under the title Femmes sur le bord de la mer, number 43. Maugham seems to be deliberately modifying these Gauguin images to suit his fiction. Having Mrs Strickland pigeonhole the work as 'essentially decorative' not only insulates her from the print's actual significance for   an understanding of her husband's missing years -the print shows his Tahitian family -but neatly rehearses reductive early misprisions of Gauguin's art. 11 Finally, mention must be made of a Strickland painting not directly described by the narrator, but which appears in a fictionalised footnote supposedly reproducing an entry in a Christie's auction catalogue. The painting, 'one of his most important works', is titled The woman of Samaria: This was described in Christie's catalogue as follows: 'A nude woman, a native of the Society Islands, is lying on the ground beside a brook. Behind is a tropical landscape with palm-trees, bananas, etc. 60 in. x 48 in. ' (p. 5) The Gauguin image referenced is, fairly obviously, the famous Te Arii Vahiné (1896, W542; see Figure 26).   The purpose of this discussion is to establish that there is a strong case to be made that Maugham used his knowledge of Gauguin's paintings in rather specific ways to represent the artistic output of his fictional artist. In book publishing history, The moon and sixpence is regularly associated with Gauguin's art in very broad terms. Publishers like to market the novel using generically apposite Gauguin images even where these have little bearing on the text. However, the identification of very specific Gauguin images and données that an inveterate literalness has lured Maugham into 'quoting' in his novel, as argued here, contributes a new and troubling level of aesthetic dissonance to an already complex readerly experience. Once it is recognised that Strickland's oeuvre is 'borrowed' from Gauguin, the reader has either to blot this knowledge from consciousness or submit to an intolerable level of fictional incredulity and disbelief.