Paul Gauguin’s Writings, Noa Noa and Quotes

Paul Gauguin’s Writings, Noa Noa and Quotes: Introduction

A Paul Gauguin quotation needs more than his name beneath it. It needs a document, a date, an edition and, when it appears in English, a translator. Without those details, a sentence can migrate from a letter into a memoir, lose its historical setting and return as an aphorism Gauguin may never have written.

At a Glance

• ArtistPaul Gauguin
• GuidePaul Gauguin’s Writings, Noa Noa and Quotes
• FocusWritings, Noa Noa and Quotes
• Key topicsNoa Noa is not one book; A publication designed to explain the paintings; Text, photograph, print and borrowed source; Two quotations with traceable histories
• OverviewA Paul Gauguin quotation needs more than his name beneath it.

Contents

1. Paul Gauguin’s Writings, Noa Noa and Quotes: Introduction
2. *Noa Noa* is not one book
3. A publication designed to explain the paintings
4. Text, photograph, print and borrowed source
5. Two quotations with traceable histories
6. Why two familiar “Gauguin quotes” are absent
7. The writings extend beyond *Noa Noa*
8. How to use a Gauguin quotation

Related Works and Media

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Paul Gauguin Prints and Woodcuts

Paul Gauguin Drawings

The same discipline is essential for Noa Noa. It is often described as Gauguin's Tahitian journal, as though there were one stable account written directly from experience. In fact, the title belongs to several related texts assembled over years. Gauguin revised his recollections; Charles Morice reshaped material for publication; images and borrowed passages entered the project; and the principal forms reached print in a different order from the one in which they were composed. ^{[1] [2]}

That complicated history does not make the writings useless. It makes them more revealing. Read as letters, handmade books, polemics and acts of self-presentation, they show Gauguin explaining his methods, promoting his work and manufacturing the identity through which European readers would encounter both artist and Pacific.

*Noa Noa* is not one book

Three principal forms organise the textual history. Their differences matter whenever a passage is quoted or used as biographical evidence.

| Form | What it is | When it reached print | |---|---|---| | Getty draft | The first full draft in Gauguin's hand, now at the Getty Research Institute, with illustrations and sketches | 1954 | | Louvre manuscript | A second manuscript in Gauguin's hand, subtitled Voyage de Tahiti, revised over a longer period and enriched with watercolours, print fragments, rubbings and photographs; it ends with Diverses choses | 1924 | | Morice publication | The literary version Charles Morice revised from material Gauguin supplied, with Morice additions including poems | Unillustrated publication in La Revue blanche in 1897; book edition from Éditions de La Plume in 1901 |

The Getty identifies its manuscript as Gauguin's first full draft. ^[3] Art Institute of Chicago scholarship explains that Gauguin lent this draft and Ancien culte mahorie to Morice, then continued working in the Louvre manuscript. He took the latter back to Tahiti in 1895 and to the Marquesas in 1901, combining his own additions with material obtained from Morice, chiefly an introduction and poems. ^[1] The Bibliothèque nationale de France records the 1897 journal appearance and 1901 La Plume edition, as well as the two surviving manuscript locations: Louvre RF 7259 and Getty 850041. ^[2]

Authorship therefore cannot be assigned by title alone. It is too broad to call Morice the co-author of every Noa Noa document, because the Getty and Louvre manuscripts remain Gauguin's material works. It is equally misleading to print a sentence from the 1901 edition as Gauguin's untouched voice. Scholarship itself differs: some readers have condemned Morice's changes, Nicholas Wadley argued that the 1901 form roughly matched Gauguin's early intention, and Linda Goddard has favoured the Louvre manuscript. The responsible first question is not “Which is authentic?” but “Which version am I reading?” ^[1]

A publication designed to explain the paintings

Gauguin began the project after returning to Paris in 1893. In an October letter to his wife, Mette, he described preparing a book about Tahiti that would help readers understand his painting. That aim gives Noa Noa two connected purposes. It offered a narrative around unfamiliar pictures, and it promoted the artist who had brought them back to a European market. ^[1]

The title contributed to that presentation. The Tahitian adjective recorded by the Art Institute as no‘ano‘a means fragrant or perfumed. Gauguin separated it into the form now familiar as Noa Noa. Scholars disagree over how well he knew Tahitian: some see faulty spelling and limited command, while Tahitian scholarship has found more linguistic awareness and wordplay than earlier critics allowed. Neither position warrants treating every word as transparent cultural authority. ^[1]

The writing occupies an unstable space between travel narrative, fiction, memory and art criticism. Gauguin could describe a landscape or event, then reorganise it to serve an image of escape from Europe. Morice's Symbolist language added another layer. A passage can tell us how an artist wished Parisian readers to imagine Tahiti without proving that local life occurred as he narrated it.

This distinction becomes especially important around named people. The revised literary figure Tehura is not documentary testimony from Teha'amana. Dialogue placed in a character's mouth cannot be returned to a historical girl as her remembered speech. A manuscript rich in Gauguin's voice also records the unequal distribution of whose accounts survived.

Text, photograph, print and borrowed source

Gauguin did not make these manuscripts as neutral containers for prose. The Louvre form joins handwriting with watercolours, fragments of prints, rubbings and photographs. Its pages allowed an image to reappear beside a later recollection, or a printed motif to change meaning through a new sequence. The planned Noa Noa print suite grew out of this same effort to make pictures and narrative operate together, although its full history belongs to the study of Gauguin's printmaking. ^[1]

Photography was another intermediary. A Getty finding aid describes nineteen Tahiti photographs dated between 1870 and 1895, including work by Charles Georges Spitz and Sophia Hoare. The group contains urban views, dance imagery and Hoare's 1885 photomontage of the Tahitian royal family centred on Pōmare I. ^[4] Such records reveal the visual material circulating around European representations of Tahiti. They do not prove that every photograph entered Noa Noa, or that an image derived from a camera was something Gauguin had witnessed himself.

Written sources also travelled. Research on Ancien culte mahorie, a manuscript Gauguin supplied to Morice, traces supposedly ancient religious material to Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's 1837 publication. Compilation could be part of Gauguin's creative method, but it is not direct transmission from an Indigenous speaker. When the resulting narrator claims access to a recovered Pacific past, the European printed source must remain visible. ^[5]

This source trail changes the question from whether the narrative is simply true or false. More useful questions follow: what was observed, what was remembered, what came through a photograph or book, what was added by an editor, and what identity did the combination create for its intended reader?

Two quotations with traceable histories

The most useful Gauguin quotations are not necessarily the most famous. They are the ones whose setting can be recovered.

In a letter sent from Pont-Aven to Vincent van Gogh on or about 22 July 1888, Gauguin wrote, “Art is an abstraction.” The Van Gogh Museum and Huygens Institute scholarly edition supplies the French text—“L’art est une abstraction”—beside a new English translation. ^{[6] [7]} The surrounding letter is about how little mere accuracy contributes to art, Gauguin's wish to interpret subjects in his own way and his hope of joining Van Gogh in Provence. The four-word sentence is therefore not a universal dictionary definition. It belongs to an exchange about interpretation, painting plans and the practical prospect of Arles.

A second line comes from Gauguin's February 1895 letter to August Strindberg. In Maurice Malingue's French edition it is letter 154, pages 267–68: “Un oeil exercé peut seul surprendre le procédé de la construction.” Henry J. Stenning translated it in 1949 as, “Only an expert can detect the process of construction.” ^[5] The line usefully confirms that Gauguin regarded structure as deliberate even when it was not immediately visible. Its wider passage, however, uses a primitivist comparison between Oceanic and inflected languages. Quoting the methodological claim does not require accepting the cultural hierarchy in which he framed it.

Both examples demonstrate why date and addressee matter. A private appeal to another artist and a public-facing literary manuscript perform different work. Even letters can be strategic: the writer may seek money, sympathy, collaboration or authority. They establish what Gauguin wrote at that moment, not the independent truth of every assertion he made.

Why two familiar “Gauguin quotes” are absent

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution” circulates widely under Gauguin's name, as does “I shut my eyes in order to see.” Neither entered this account because no reliable primary document, original-language wording, date, edition and translator could be established from the governing sources.

That is not proof that Gauguin never voiced any related thought. It is a decision about what can responsibly be printed between quotation marks. Repetition on quotation sites, posters and merchandise is evidence of popularity, not authorship. Until a primary location is produced, these sentences should be labelled unverified rather than silently promoted to historical fact.

The writings extend beyond *Noa Noa*

Gauguin's surviving writing is substantial. Linda Goddard's research for the National Gallery of Art records seven extant manuscripts, thirteen listed in the artist's estate sale, a large correspondence, articles in French and Tahitian newspapers and a satirical broadsheet. She argues that pocket editions can conceal the material complexity of the originals and encourage readers to mistake carefully constructed documents for unmediated access to the artist's mind. ^[10]

The Saint Louis Art Museum's Modern Thought and Catholicism makes that construction unusually visible. The surviving object, number 287:1948, is a 92-page manuscript transcribed in the Marquesas in 1902 from a text Gauguin first wrote in Tahiti in 1897–98. It attacks Catholic institutions, considers comparative religion and relies heavily on the spiritualist Gerald Massey. Gauguin hoped to publish it in Paris and dedicated it to Morice, but it never reached him. ^[8]

Even its English title requires judgement. The museum explains that the French word esprit can mean thought, mind, consciousness, wit or feeling, and states why its online translation retains “thought.” A translator has not merely moved fixed content between languages; a recorded choice shapes what an English reader understands. ^[8]

Gauguin's final major manuscript, Avant et après, offers a different problem. Completed on Hiva Oa in 1903, two months before his death, the Courtauld manuscript MS.2020.XX.1 contains 213 handwritten pages with drawings, traced monotypes and transfer drawings. It is part memoir and part manifesto, moving among artistic opinions, recollections and attacks on colonial and church authorities. ^[9]

Retrospective memoir does not become a court transcript because its author was present. The Courtauld notes that the text denounces official misconduct while also containing Gauguin's own racial stereotyping and misogyny. Its account of Van Gogh in Arles, for example, is historically important because Gauguin constructed it later and for readers—not because lateness and self-interest vanish. The manuscript is evidence of memory, polemic and self-fashioning at once. ^[9]

How to use a Gauguin quotation

Before repeating a line, check five things. First, identify the document: letter, manuscript, printed edition or later report. Second, give its date and recipient when it is correspondence. Third, name the original-language edition or institutional manuscript. Fourth, record the English translator and page or digital edition. Fifth, read enough surrounding text to limit what the sentence can prove.

For Noa Noa, add a sixth question: which form? The Getty draft, Louvre manuscript and Morice publication are related, but they are not interchangeable. A good citation preserves those differences instead of ironing them into one authoritative voice.

Gauguin's writings are most valuable when their construction remains visible. They illuminate a restless artist working across words and images, but they also show a European author selecting, borrowing and arranging the Pacific for distant readers. Edition history, translation and context do not obstruct access to that voice. They reveal what kind of voice it was.

Related Pages

• Paul Gauguin: Colonial Context and Relationships
• When Will You Marry? (Nafea faa ipoipo)
• Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and the Marquesas
• Te arii vahine (The King’s Wife)

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Art Institute of Chicago, The Noa Noa Suite, 1893/94, online scholarly catalogue View source
2. Bibliothèque nationale de France, conventional-title record for Noa Noa, notice FRBNF12079829 View source
3. Getty Research Institute, Paul Gauguin's Noa Noa Manuscript, Getty Magazine, spring 2014, pp. 34–35 View source
4. Getty Research Institute, Finding aid for Images from Tahiti, 1870–1895, collection 93.R.90 View source
5. Art Institute of Chicago, Noa Noa / Ancien culte mahorie, scholarly catalogue notes and source trail View source
6. Van Gogh Museum and Huygens Institute, Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh, Pont-Aven, on or about 22 July 1888, letter 646, English translation View source
7. Van Gogh Museum and Huygens Institute, Credits and acknowledgements, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, for the scholarly edition and new English translation View source
8. Saint Louis Art Museum, Modern Thought and Catholicism, object 287:1948, with transcription and translation notes View source
9. The Courtauld, Avant et après, object MS.2020.XX.1 View source
10. National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Linda Goddard, Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin, Center 39, p. 97 View source