Exhibition Casts a Telling Light on Gauguin’s Odd Friendship

They were colleagues, confidantes, the best of friends. But you’d never know it from Paul Gauguin’s unflattering portraits of his painting buddy.

One depicts Meyer de Haan as a smirking devil clutching a writhing serpent. Another paints the Dutchman as a yellow-eyed fox pawing a naked young girl. Here’s De Haan hunched demonically over a bowl of fruit. There’s De Haan leering at two Tahitian beauties easily half his age.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

That’s exactly the point of “Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu 1889-90,” an astonishing new exhibition of works by the odd couple of the Postimpressionist movement. It opens today at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum and runs through April 29.

More than 40 Gauguin and De Haan paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture--culled from collections around the world--capture perfectly the petty jealousies and rivalries that simmered below the surface of a mutually inspiring friendship.

Most Gauguin shows focus on his last days in French Polynesia, where he died in 1903 still seeking the meaning of life and the paradise he discovered there.

This one delves deeper into Gauguin’s curious relationship with De Haan and others during the two years he was at Le Pouldu, a quaint fishing village in the western French province of Brittany.

Gauguin was already well-established and mixed with people such as Vincent van Gogh, who once confessed to Gauguin: “I find my own artistic ideas excessively commonplace in comparison with yours.” Yet he didn’t have much money to show for his fame.

De Haan’s celebrity was mostly confined to his native Netherlands, but he was wealthy enough to drop what he was doing, become Gauguin’s student and pay their bills.

Master and pupil worked side by side on an eclectic jumble of portraits, still-lifes and landscapes, experimenting with a bold new palette of colors. Often, they differed vastly in interpreting the identical scene. Each painted “The Valley of Kerzellec,” but De Haan zoomed in on the lavender vineyards while Gauguin took a more distant approach, placing a solitary figure in the foreground.

Gauguin and De Haan, both deep thinkers, shared many common interests and philosophies of life. But when each was smitten by a pretty innkeeper, who rebuffed Gauguin’s advances only to have a dalliance with De Haan, their friendship foundered.

The mustachioed Gauguin, who cut a downright dashing figure if his self-portraits were accurate, was both intrigued and annoyed that De Haan, a hunchback with a scraggly red beard, pointy ears and slanted, catlike eyes, could possibly be luckier in love.