Son of Paul Gauguin: the life and times of Emile Gauguin is a biography of the insignificant son (his words) of a great and famed painter. A mechanical engineer by trade as far away from the art world as you can get to a world of measurement and construction. Yet Paul Gauguin’s first son’s life from birth to death was never boring

Although one may think an engineering career would be staid and carefully ordered, it was nothing of the kind. It started out well-planned being groomed to be an aristocrat, a student in the art of war, finishing as a professional engineer. But then, the plan changed with exciting highs and horrendous lows at every turn.

Sprinkled with newly found Gauguin trivia we see a child some might feel neglected by his family, cursed to have an internationally renowned father, grow and mature to a handsome, confident young man yet be rejected and ostracized at almost regular intervals: in Denmark and Colombia and America.

Yet still he remained a proud, engineer-adventurer-warrior leading rebel fighters cheating death in the northern Andes, constantly searching for work on three continents, continually facing financial collapse, fighting off hunger as a homeless transient in the American Great Depression.

At the same time his marriage was on the rocks, filled with blistering hatred which after a number of long periods of separation and dizzying attempts at reconciliation ended abruptly each time in near total relationship destruction eventually resulting in complete abandonment of five generations including his mother, brothers, wife, children and grandchildren.

Then, suddenly, at life’s darkest hour when he wrote his Colombian cousin, summarizing page-after-page his pathetic existence, almost as a miracle his life two thirds over changed one year later to one of happiness and peace.