In 1903, after the better part of 12 years in Polynesia, Gauguin faced death at the age of 54, his body weakened by alcohol, general dissipation (the effects of syphilis) and the tropical climate. Yet even then he was still observing and manipulating his image. While he longed to return to France, where he would have received better medical treatment, he feared that going back would damage the myth he had worked so hard to create of, as his friend Daniel de Monfreid put it, “the legendary artist who sends from the depths of Oceania his disconcerting, inimitable works”. Gauguin died a victim of another of his great legacies to art, an idea found endlessly in the work of subsequent artists from Picasso to Tracey Emin: “I am my art.”