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This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of art. In much of its general outline, this famous novel follows the life of Paul Gauguin, famous French post-impressionist painter, but it is not a novelized biography of Gauguin. Rather it is a sharply delineated, carefully wrought "private life", written by one of the most vivid and penetrating contemporary literary masters.

Charles Strickland, the central character, was a stock broker in London. One day, at the age of forty, he left his business, his wife and their children and went to Paris. He had neither money nor prospects. He knew almost nothing of art. But he was seized with a passion to paint and for the rest of his life nothing else mattered to him. He gave up everything to which he had been accustomed for extreme poverty, social ostracism and the freedom to paint. When he finally died of leprosy in Tahiti, where he had gone native, the few paintings which turned up for sale brought only six to ten francs apiece. But he had achieved his desire to create beauty and with the years, the world fully recognized his blazing genius.

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