The first is an article in Mercure de France by one "Maurice Huret. The very literalness of this creative procedure prompts further inquiry into whether the art-historical texts Maugham invents to lend verisimilitude to the intellectual milieu in which Strickland's work is first noticed may not similarly be tied to the historical facts of Gauguin's early critical reception. The moon and sixpence Bookreader Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. Maugham has borrowed unashamedly from Gauguin's actual output to supply the substance of his fictional hero's artistic achievement. Recently I published an article demonstrating that the descriptions of Strickland's oeuvre in The Moon and Sixpence either evoke specific paintings by Gauguin, or else gesture toward identifiable phases in Gauguin's artistic career (see Wright, "References to Gauguin Paintings"). It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. Maugham also mischievously plunders specific realia from Gauguin's life-world to build some of its inner detail. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919.
Not intended as fictionalized biography-the raw biographical facts are too plainly incompatible-the novel nevertheless follows an abstract outline of Gauguin's life and career to shape the story of Maugham's fictional artist, Charles Strickland. Maughams story is that of a respectable stockbroker who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage and goes alone to Paris to follow a new ideal - the ideal of great and for a time unrecognisable art. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) draws on the life of Paul Gauguin in complex ways, some of them surprising.
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