When Gauguin died in 1903 in the Polynesian archipelago, he had already been forgotten in his homeland. He spent his final years isolated and syphilitic in the house he had nicknamed the House of Pleasure, all the while taking ever more potent doses of morphine.

When Gauguin painted the portrait of his sleeping four-year-old daughter Aline some twenty years earlier (the work is on view here in the gallery), the situation was quite different. Gauguin had abandoned his career as a stockbroker in favour of art: art that was to be wild, unrestrained and in defiance of all the norms of the age. At times he painted without pause – he could easily produce a picture a week – but there were no buyers for them.

Paul Gauguin had married a Danish woman, Mette Gad, and for lack of money the family moved from Paris to Copenhagen. This he would soon regret. Like August Strindberg (and Bertolt Brecht), he detested the Danes, whom he considered hopelessly ignorant when it came to art, boorish, peasant-like and hypo-critical. He deplored everything from Danish taste in interior decoration to their methods of child-rearing. In letters home to his friend Camille Pissarro, he wrote that every day he contemplated going up into the attic and hanging himself. However, as a devout Catholic, he never followed through on that particular threat.

The Danish art historian Karl Madsen, who appears in Five Portraits, was one of the few people with whom he felt in tune, and the progressive Edvard Brandes was one of his few admirers. A few years later, Gauguin left his family and Denmark for good. Back in Paris, he asked Strindberg to write the foreword for a catalogue, but Strindberg refused, as he disliked Gauguin’s paintings. Gauguin instead printed Strindberg’s written refusal in the catalogue.

Gauguin began to think of himself as a sauvage, a creature with more in common with exotic Tahiti than with bourgeois Paris. As an artist he rejected conventional morality and drew up his own rules, which, among other things, allowed him to enter into relations with very young girls. For that and other reasons, both he and his art have been reviled in recent years. Needless to say, I object to that in the strongest possible terms.

Incidentally, Gauguin’s son Jean was married to the theatre painter and illustrator Sys, who later married my former wife’s paternal grandfather.