Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin

Sue Prideaux

Wild Thing won the 2025 American Library in Paris Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize, was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was named one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2025, one of The New Yorker's Top Books of 2025, one of Vogue's Best Books of 2025, one of the Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year, one of the New York Public Library's Best Books of 2025, and one of the Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2025. An original and revealing portrait of the misunderstood French Post-Impressionist artist. Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved. Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso. Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin's most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin's son, and a sample of Gauguin's teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde.