Paul Gaugin, Robert Louis Stevenson and the South Pacific : a study in humanistic geography
Date
1975
Authors
Aquino, Ricardo Bigi de
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Abstract
This study endeavours to present an overall view of the Pacific work of Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson. These two artists were responsible for a considerable expansion of the South Pacific romantic tradition in Western popular thought. Through their works, the 'South Seas myth' was definitively incorporated into the substratum of Western culture and attained permanent forms of artistic expression. The study follows a geographic-humanistic approach to the exposition of the nature and content of the works of Stevenson and Gauguin relating to Pacific themes.
The myth which has been created about the Pacific, attributing characteristics of environmental splendour and ideal living conditions to that geographical area, is rooted in the human belief in the existence of an earthly paradise. This belief is part of man's mystique since time immemorial. The location of this paradise in the islands of the South Pacific was the result of creative processes in which the contributions of eighteenth century explorers and nineteenth century travellers and artists played a role of paramount importance.
Stevenson, along with Herman Melville, Charles Warren Stoddard and Pierre Lot i, was among the writers whose works exerted farthest-reaching effects upon the development of the South Seas myth' in contemporary thought. Stevensonian South Seas prose obeyed the same principles of allurement and romance which had been traditional to previous literary accounts within the spirit of the 'myth.' It was infused, however, with topographical qualities which assured the rendering of a convincing local atmosphere to most of his novels and short stories.
Gauguin developed his Pacific art in a very personal way, synthesizing the physical and human environments of Tahiti and Hiva-Oa in order to obtain a transcendental representation of Polynesian themes. His paintings are not photographic reproductions of the island milieu, although many of them possess descriptive potential to serve as accurate portrayals of late nineteenth century rural life in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Gauguin painted from memory rather than from nature and endowed his works with a quality of permanence based on a personal search for the ultimate reality of places and people.
It is argued that the contribution of Stevenson and Gauguin to the reassertion of the 'South Seas myth' in Western consciousness is strong and permanent and has influenced a significant number of twentieth century Pacific artists.