The suicide story, and a cool room at Vollard’s

The most repeated story about this painting needs handling with tongs. In a letter to his friend and Paris go-between Daniel de Monfreid in February 1898, Gauguin wrote that he had finished the picture, gone up into the mountains, and tried to kill himself with arsenic, and that the dose failed because he vomited it back up. He had even foreshadowed the plan in a December 1897 letter. So it is certain that Gauguin said this.

Whether it happened is another matter. The entire account is self-reported, written after the fact, and dramatized, and Gauguin was a relentless self-mythologizer; his biographer noted that few men worked harder at building their own legend. The arsenic story fits the painting’s life-and-death theme almost too neatly. No independent witness ever confirmed the attempt, and modern forensic work on teeth attributed to Gauguin found no arsenic. So the right way to carry it is the careful way: Gauguin claimed he tried to take his own life after finishing the picture, the only source is his own letter, and scholars treat it as part fact and part self-promotion, neither swallowed whole nor waved away.

The painting itself was shipped to Paris and first shown at the gallery of the dealer Ambroise Vollard, from mid-November to early December 1898, to mixed reviews. The deliberate unreadability that Gauguin prized, the refusal to spell out a single clear story, divided the critics from the start. Some saw a masterpiece; others saw a riddle with the answer left out. That split has more or less followed the picture ever since.