Pilferer, paedophile and true great: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery reviewed

On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile protégé, Paul Gauguin, who had explained to him how artists in the future would ‘find salvation by replenishing themselves’ from the works of remote peoples and places. Pissarro was not convinced. Gauguin, he grumbled, was always ‘poaching’ from someone. Once it had been Pissarro and his fellow impressionists, now it was the native peoples of Oceania.

Plus ça change… Over the succeeding century and a quarter, Gauguin (1848–1903) has frequently been condemned. The magnificent new exhibition at the National Gallery, Gauguin Portraits, is a treat for the eye, full of superb loans, including not only paintings and works on paper, but wildly inventive sculpture in wood and clay too.

Nonetheless, there is an accompanying tone of criticism to which not all famous dead artists would be subject. Even the authors of catalogue essays and wall texts feel obliged to tick him off.