By and large he painted them naked or primitively dressed anyway, a concoction between the distant past and his own imagination. So in Parahi te Marae (1892), a yellow field is circled with a fence decorated with an invented “death’s head” design, probably taken from a Maori earplug he had seen in Paris. Gauguin knew that the scene would tap into clichéd beliefs in Polynesian cannibalism and “was not above playing to the prejudices and fears of his audience”.

His naked young girls fitted the image of Tahiti as the new Cythera (birthplace of Venus) popularised by the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. “He’s not selling out to the market by any means because he’s always creating difficult work, but at the same time he had an eye on the market,” Ms Thomson said.

Gauguin was an incorrigible and groundbreaking manipulator of the truth, she added. In 1897 he published Noa Noa, Tahitian stories that he claimed to have gleaned from one of his mistresses. In reality he had copied them out of J. A Moerenhout’s book Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan.

The artist was ahead of his time in the way that he constructed his image, referring to himself (falsely) as an Inca because of his upbringing in Peru. He deliberately alarmed contemporaries when he painted himself in 1889 as Christ with red hair like his friend Van Gogh, in Christ in the Garden of Olives.

Eventually he was forced to live out the consequences of his self-promotion, Ms Thomson said. “Towards the end of his life he wanted to come back to Europe but his dealer said, ‘No, it’s too late. You are the artist over there.’ ”
 

 【编辑：黄辉】