Guys like Gauguin

In the 1920s a group of previously unconnected writers and artists settled on the remote island of Tahiti, thousands of miles from home. Tahiti was the only South Pacific island at that time to have an artistic community. Why?

The introductory chapters of Guys like Gauguin show how the image of Tahiti as a paradise island was created by artists and writers following the visit of Captain Cook and other explorers in the 1760s, and then how this image was reinforced during the nineteenth century by writers and artists like Herman Melville, Pierre Loti, John La Farge and Paul Gauguin. The 1920s craze for Tahiti and the South Seas is also examined, when more than 150 South Sea movies were produced, many books about Tahiti were published and tourism boomed.

The main part of Guys like Gauguin looks at the lives and artistic work of more than a dozen American and European writers and artists who, less than 20 years after the death of Paul Gauguin, moved to Tahiti to live and work. Authors such as American novelist Zane Grey, Mutiny on the Bounty's Nordhoff and Hall, Evelyn Waugh's elder brother Alec, adventurer Dean Frisbie and mysterious Asterisk. Painters such as George Biddle. Jerome Blum, William Alister Macdonald and Viscount Jack Hastings. Why did they choose Tahiti, what did they do and were they guys like Gauguin?