• ISBN13: 9780571365937
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: N/A
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publisher Imprint: Faber & Faber
• Publication Date: September 12, 2024
• Pages: 416
• Original Price: GBP 30.0
• Language: N/A
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 912 grams

<p><span class="a-text-bold">*Gorgeously illustrated with 70 colour images*<br></span><span class="a-text-italic"><br>You wish to teach me what is within myself: learn first what is within you . . . I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.</span><span><br><br>Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.<br><br>In </span><span class="a-text-italic">Wild Thing</span><span>, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.<br><br>Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.</span></p>

<h3><span>About the Author</span></h3> <div class="a-section a-spacing-small a-padding-small"> <span>Sue Prideaux's first biography </span><span class="a-text-italic">Edvard Munch:</span><span> </span><span class="a-text-italic">Behind the Scream </span><span>(2005) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. </span><span class="a-text-italic">Strindberg: A Life</span><span> (2012) won the Duff Cooper Prize, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. </span><span class="a-text-italic">I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche </span><span>(2018) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, longlisted for the Cundhill History Prize and Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown and was </span><span class="a-text-italic">The Times </span><span>Biography of the Year.</span> </div>