Wild Thing

Prideaux's biography sets out to dismantle the received image of Gauguin as a syphilitic predator who abandoned his family for Tahitian excess, using newly surfaced manuscripts, his son's untranslated memoir, and even dental analysis to challenge the syphilis diagnosis itself. The revisionism is the headline, but the book earns its length by refusing to simply swap villain for hero: Gauguin emerges still difficult, still complicit in colonial structures he also railed against, but rendered with enough contradiction to resist caricature in either direction. Where it succeeds is in linking that personal reappraisal to the paintings themselves, showing how the myths accumulated around his biography have shaped, and distorted, how his work gets read.