Paul Gauguin, Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch) (1892)

Say “Paul Gauguin” and we are transported to a world of sturdy, golden-skinned women, patterned cloth, glowing colors, and tropical foliage. Once we are established in this South Seas Arcadia, random facts about the author of these iconic works float into our consciousness. We remember that Gauguin abandoned his family and his career as a stockbroker in order to paint, that he shared Vincent van Gogh’s Yellow House in Arles—van Gogh’s ear-slicing episode followed a quarrel with his irascible guest—and that he went to Polynesia in search of a primitive paradise. According to the evidence of the paintings and a journal he wrote, he found what he was looking for. Or something like that.

The preceding paragraph is not entirely inaccurate; neither does it do justice to the far more complicated and far more interesting story of Gauguin’s life as an artist. That story is the subject of the ambitious, if slightly problematic, exhibition, “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” seen last year at Tate Modern, London, and now on view at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.[1]The show charts what its curators maintain was the inextricable connection between the course of Gauguin’s art and his forging of a distinctive persona: his simultaneous development of the flamboyant imagery and brilliant palette with which he is most closely associated and the invention of a fantastic self. While this