Sue Prideaux opens Wild Thing with a forensic inquiry rather than a painting, an unorthodox decision for a biography of an artist that makes her aim clear: She wants to dismantle the simplified, sensational myths that have shaped Paul Gauguin’s reputation. By bringing in new scientific and archival findings, she challenges the view of him as an unthinking colonialist on the one hand and his (self-mediated) reputation as an iconoclastic “savage” on the other. In using the evidence to reveal a more tangled story about a figure whose life and art have long been flattened, she ultimately investigates the relationship between legend and reality.

This revision starts with the 2000 discovery of Gauguin’s teeth in a well on Hiva Oa. Prideaux recounts how tests for mercury, arsenic, and other common syphilis treatments came back negative. This scientific result contradicts the story of Gauguin as a sexual predator who spread syphilis around the South Seas, a claim that has colored interpretations of his behavior, artwork, and eventual death. Once Prideaux questions this long‑standing diagnosis, other assumptions tied to it start to look unstable. For example, while Prideaux covers Gauguin’s problematic relationships with teenage girls in detail, she also notes his ambivalence about an exploitative dynamic that was widespread at the time. She quotes him as remarking that he “felt ashamed of [his] race” when a woman accused him of “[bringing] back a trollop [Tehamana]” (233), arguing that his response stemmed not merely from anger at the woman but from self-revulsion—awareness of his own role in a compromised system. Her conclusion that he nevertheless pursued the relationship out of “love” for Tehamana does not absolve him, but it does suggest his complexity.   

Prideaux also challenges the larger-than-life view of Gauguin as an artistic genius driven by instinct and passion. This was the view that predominated before contemporary ideas about race, gender, and colonialism prompted a return to his legacy, and Prideaux uses Gauguin’s own words to deconstruct it. For instance, she quotes him describing his artistic process as “uncertain” and “uneasy” in comparison to Van Gogh’s, implying the degree of effort required to achieve Gauguin’s signature unschooled effect. This analysis dovetails with Prideaux’s reconstruction of Gauguin’s evolving identification as a “savage,” which she frames as a performance (if one prompted by earnest disenchantment with European modernity).

However, this same performance ultimately complicates the book’s effort to excavate the “real” Gauguin, particularly as so much of its evidence comes from Gauguin himself. His description of his self-portrait as Jean Valjean illustrates the extent to which Gauguin was engaged in a project of self-mythologizing:

The face of a bandit, coloured with the reds, the violets scored with gleams of fire like the glow of a furnace in the eyes, which are the seat of the painter’s struggling thoughts…the hot sexual blood floods the face while the furnace-like colours enveloping the eyes suggesting the fire that burns molten in the souls of painters like ourselves (123-24)

This depiction is somewhat at odds with the details of Gauguin’s life. Prideaux notes, for instance, that Gauguin remained faithful to his wife for many years—a detail that undercuts his reputation for sexual voraciousness, which he himself here cultivates. However, the biography suggests that Gauguin’s conception of himself ultimately fused with his reality in significant ways; by his time in the Marquesas, he had become the tortured outcast he here identifies as the artistic archetype. Prideaux’s biography of Gauguin thus culminates in a consideration of the line that separates truth from myth, hinting that for the artist, the two may be indistinguishable—their life itself an aesthetic undertaking.