SOUTH SEA ROMANCE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4958, 20 February 1937, Page 6

SOUTH SEA ROMANCE

TAHITIAN GYRL AND HER TRANSIENT FAME. Among the gift frames, lorgnettes, and top hats of an art exhibition in London, stalked the spirit of a South Sea beauty—whose love inspired one of the world’s greatest artists and bequeathed to posterity glories which would otherwise have been lost for ever. And While admirers gazed on her lovely face, immortalised on canvas, that same woman, now a wrinkled hag, was limping her way through the muddy fields of a South Sea islands, tending pigs for a Chinaman! The exhibition was of nineteenth century French art. The picture was by Gaugin; its

title, cryptically, was “Her Portrait’’; it came from the private collection of M. Otto Sachs, of Paris, and is worth £25,000.

Who is it? Well, the very title implies what place the subject had in the heart of this lonely, erratic genius. .

There she is, a gorgeous sylph of a girl, typifying somehow the luscious tropic beauty of the island paradise in which she lived. The smooth, golden skih, the lovely shapely limbs, the full lips—what setting could this budding flower possibly have had except one of blue waters, luxurious sunshine, brilliant birds, green verdure? Of course, he called it “Her Portrait.” Did not this frail beauty love him, bear him children, nurse him in ill-health? Was she not the inspiration of those pictures of his, now priceless?

She was. But Gaugin died in 1903. And to-day, the lovely Tahura a Tai ekes out a misei’able existence in the South Seas port of Papeete, tending pigs for a Chinaman! Her eyes are rheumy, her limbs, once so shapely, are swollen with horrid elephantiasis. Her features, once like polished smoked-ivory, are wrinkled and pimply.

And, forgotten by the world, she limps her way through the muddy fields, tending the snorting, brutish animals which she must feed that she may not starve.

Yet the other day a portrait of her was sold in America for £25,000! The pictures of her which her lovermate painted are worth hundreds of thousands.

Back in the last century, Paul Gaugin, beginning to get recognition with his rich paintings, tired of “civilised” life. He searched for a Utopia, a lotus-eater’s paradise, where one loved, ate, drowsed, numbed by a thousand emotions.

So, good-bye to his Danish wife and five children. And in the country of Taiarapu he found a South Seas retreat, and there the lithe Tahura, a maiden of 12, skipped across his vision.

Dazzled, Gaugin produced gold for the father. Tahura was his. Undaunted by this somewhat prosaic beginning to their association, Tahura lavished on the strange white master all the affection and care of which she was capable. Gaugin, deliriously happy, painted her in all sorts of settings, lived with her in a lonely hut where no sound penetrated except the screech of tropic birds and the gentle splash of blue waters on the sandy beaches, the whine of perfumed breezes through emerald fronds. These beauties, Gaugin knew, were transient. The white people would encroach even on this beauty, soon to transform it into a colony of underfed slaves, of dishonest, moneygrabbing, alcoholic loungers. He had no illusions as to the “civilising” influences of Westerners. So he painted like fury. With magic brush he transmitted the glories of his surroundings and the beauty of his lovely mistress. Artistically she was uncomprehending. Tahura knew nothing of art, though she guessed intuitively her lover’s genius. She only knew that she loved him. Restless, Gaugin wandered away from her, but memory brought him back. Emile, a boy as beautiful as his mother, was born. In 1903, tortured by an agonising illness, surrounded by natives, but far from his beloved Tahura, Gaugin died. Groaning with pain, cursthe heat, paying at last the penalties of lifelong excesses, he worked like a man demented. Many masterpieces which have since sold for thousands were painted in less than an hour. “Tahitian Eve,” “Her Portrait, ’’ “A Nude,” “Who Are We” (this last fetched £25,000 recently)—all these show the dusky beauty.