Many art collectors would give their eye teeth for a painting by Paul Gauguin but how much would they give for his teeth? 
 
 Four rotten molars, which may have belonged to the French Post-Impressionist, have been found by archaeologists at the bottom of a well that the painter built on the remote island of Hiva Oa, on the Marquese islands in the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 According to the Gauguin specialist Caroline Boyle-Turner, there is strong possibility that the teeth belonged to the quarrelsome, syphilitic painter. 
 
 They almost certainly came from a European mouth, she says, because they are severely decayed. Marquese islanders of a century ago did not eat sugar and their teeth did not decay. The well, dug beside a hut used by Gauguin, was used to dump debris from his home but was sealed just after his death. 
 
 Writing in Van Gogh Studies, an annual review from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Ms Boyle-Turner gives the first full account of the objects found during an excavation of the well seven years ago. They include four teeth that Ms Boyle-Turner believes Gauguin may have kept as a souvenir after they were extracted while he lived on the island for the last two years of his life in 1901-03. 
 
 Gauguin, born in Paris in 1848 to a relatively well-off family, befriended but then quarrelled with most ofthe leading Impressionist artists before breaking with the movement. 
 
 After giving up his job as a foreign exchange broker, he lived briefly with Vincent van Gogh at Arles in southern France in November and December 1888. 
 
 Their spectacular rows and brawls culminated in Van Gogh threatening Gauguin with a razor and then cutting off part of his own ear. Gauguin returned to Paris, spent time at an artists' colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany, and eventually settled for the last years of his life in the Pacific Islands. He named his hut on Hiva Oa the "Maison de Jouir", or "the house of orgasm". 
 
 The island council built a replica of the hut in 2003 and finds from the archaeological dig are displayed there. Other odds and ends from the painter's home found 9ft down the well include a New Zealand beer bottle, five broken plates from Brittany, smashed perfume bottles, orange and ochre minerals which are presumed to be hand-made paints, a makeshift artist's palette and most intriguingly an empty Bovril jar. 
 
 This suggests that Gauguin,an enfant terrible all his life, remained a rebel to the end. He was probably the only Frenchman ever to have liked Bovril. 

 This unique grave in the Calvary Cemetery of Atunoa is the final resting place of art world maverick Paul Gauguin. 
 
 Born in 1848, Paul Gauguin was a Post-Impressionist French artist whose curiosity, sense of adventure and wild, amorous spirit, led him from his life in France- where he lived as a spoiled bohemian- to a decadent, expatriate life in Tahiti. In 1901, an ailing and exhausted Gauguin settled on the small island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia. 
 
 His flee from polite European society to the seemingly simpler and less restricted life of colonial Polynesia was echoed in his artistic embrace of so-called “Primativism,” a school of art later exemplified by Pablo Picasso. But his search for a place free from European influence and morals proved to be futile. In 1903, Gaugin attempted to expose the incompetence of the French officials ruling over Hiva Oa. He was unsuccessful, and was fined by the local magistrate and sentenced to three months in jail (he would not live to serve his sentence). Gauguin’s health began to deteriorate alarmingly. In his pain, he turned to morphine, and found himself almost totally unable to paint. He died on the morning of May 8, 1903 at the “Masion du Jouir,” his two-story thatched home. He was buried the next day in the local Catholic Cemetery. 
 
 Today, Gauguin’s legacy is strong in French Polynesia. Gauguin still has descendants living in the country, the progeny of numerous assignations with local vahine — women who accompanied him as common-law wives, muses, and models. The MS Paul Gauguin is a small cruise ship that takes people around French Polynesia, from Papeete to Bora Bora and also off to the more distant Marquesas. In Hiva Oa, you will also find the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center, which features a reconstruction of the Maison de Jouir. At the Calvary Cemetery you can pay homage to his restless spirit at this lovely grave, which is often festooned with the bright tropical flowers he painted so very well. 

 Review of Boyle-Turner’s "Paul Gaugin & the Marquesas" by Paul F. Ross 
 
 
 
 Paul Gauguin, artist, left his home in France to experience and capture in his paintings the 
 
 civilization-unspoiled beauty of Tahiti and, in the last nineteen months of his life, Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. Carolyn Boyle-Turner, art historian having accomplished her doctorate at Columbia University, has long studied Gauguin and, in this account, reviews Gauguin’s life-closing time on Hiva Oa. Boyle-Turner grew up in Ohio, lived an important part of her life in Massachusetts where she was a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design for a time. Then, in the freedom of retirement, she and her ____________________________________________________________________________________ 
 
 
 
 Boyle-Turner, Caroline "Paul Gauguin & the Marquesas: Paradise found?" 2016, Vagamundo, Pont Aven, France, 256 pages 
 
 ____________________________________________________________________________________ 
 
 
 
 husband established their home in Pont Aven, France, a longtime summering spot for artists extending to today. In the late 1880s it was a summer gathering place for Gauguin, Laval, Serusier, and others. Boyle-Turner has lectured about Gauguin for cruise ship visitors to Tahiti and the Marquesas. In those travels, she often has visited and tarried in Gauguin’s residential locations, has met and learned to know the Tahitians and Marquesans, has interviewed them, and has attended with care to their oral histories about Gauguin’s life on Hiva Oa, meeting and learning to know some of Gauguin’s descendents. This reader and, at this moment, book reviewer is husband to an artist and understands the fascination and compulsion of Hank Turner, husband to Caroline Boyle-Turner, in following Dr. Boyle-Turner around the world as she pursues her interest in Gauguin. Life is enriched by that passion about art. Hank and Caroline Turner were friends to me and my wife as both families resided in Lincoln MA in the late 1980s and 1990s. 
 
 
 
 September 10, 1901 to May 8, 1903, a wee bit over nineteen months, Gauguin lived in the village of Atuona on Hiva Oa. Before moving, he had to arrange business with his art dealer in Paris so that he had a market for his art and a source of income. His first order of business on Hiva Oa was to find land and build a house, arranging and decorating it to his intended uses and lifestyle as well as adapting it to the seashore circumstances of living at that spot. He found the companionship he needed among the Europeans living there and among the native Marquesans. He entertained regularly in his home. He produced drawings and paintings. The once-a-week ship visiting from Papeete on Tahiti connected Atuona and Hiva Oa to the rest of the world … to the mail deliveries from France, to the capabilities for shipping Gauguin’s paintings to his art dealer in Paris, to the deliveries of groceries to Hiva Oa. When the delivery ship went aground, service was interrupted for several months. Life in paradise had its risks. Boyle-Turner presents examples of his work … paintings, drawings, wood carvings, sculpture in plaster … introducing us to the precedents in Gauguin’s own work and in the art of the world. She has visited the places Gauguin frequented. She has gotten to know, and interviewed, Marquesans whose parents and grandparents knew Gauguin and have oral histories to report. Boyle-Turner also draws from the scholarly literature about Gauguin. 
 
 
 
 A habit for all superb historians and scientists is that they tell their readers where they obtained the information just presented. They cite their sources in footnotes. Footnoting is a fading habit in works intended for broad readership, footnotes often presented as “endnotes” at the back of the book and, too often, not even marked on the page were the cited information is presented. The endnote shows the page it wishes to footnote, quotes a phrase from that page, then discloses its secrets. These are practices designed to lull the reader into thinking that everything the author says is well-grounded truth. Boyle-Turner has not bowed to this cultural change. Her pages average three to five footnotes per page. She cites extensively work in English and French, sources from elsewhere where relevant. The reader finds a bibliography with full citations, the bibliography an up to date treasure in the literature about Gauguin. She provides a chronology of Gauguin’s lifetime focusing, she notes, on events particularly relevant to Gauguin’s nineteen months in the Marquesas. The index is helpful. Every hard-earned practice of sound communication and scholarship learned over the 3,000 years of human writing is retained in this work by Boyle-Turner, a gift that careful readers will deeply appreciate. 
 
 
 
 For those who view Gauguin as something of a rake, a European male taking advantage of Polynesian women, Boyle-Turner reviews what is knowable about his behavior, about the Marquesan and Polynesian culture of that time, about the importance of having a light skin color for Marquesan women, and about how that culture may have affected both the women’s behavior as well as Gauguin’s behavior. Gauguin brought with him his own attitudes about how Christian mores and French (European) civilization were imposing their standards upon the Polynesian people, a practice Gauguin saw as destroying the beauty and appropriateness of the culture the Polynesians had built before the Europeans arrived. Boyle-Turner also understands (on Gauguin’s behalf) the meaning of living alone. Hers is a perspective saying “Let’s look at what was in place at that time for the participants, not pre-judge the situation from our own cultural standards.” 
 
 
 
 Somehow Scott Reyburn (Reyburn, 2016), writing in the Art & Design section of the New York Times on 2 December 2016, learned of two photographs of Gauguin – it seems they are photos of Gauguin – unearthed by Boyle-Turner and reproduced in her book. Reyburn cited them as interesting new material. They may be the only photos of Gauguin discovered to date that were captured during his life in Hiva Oa. 
 
 
 
 For readers interested in the last months of Gauguin’s life and production, Boyle-Turner’s new work presents important material not previously available. 
 
 
 
 Bellevue, Washington 
 
 4 December 2016 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2016 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved. 
 
 
 
 References 
 
 
 
 Boyle-Turner, Caroline "Paul Gauguin & the Marquesas: Paradise found?" 2016, Vagamundo, Pont Aven, France 
 
 
 
 Reyburn, Scott “Photos, perhaps, show a rare glimpse of Gauguin in Tahiti,” Art & Design section, The New York Times, 2 December 2016, [...]
– Artist Paul Gauguin was a little more than a year old when his parents left Paris bound for Peru. But during a stop at a Chilean fort near Antarctica on Oct. 30, 1849, Gauguin's father, Clovis, died suddenly of a heart aneurysm. His family saw him buried, but the next day were forced to continue on to Lima. Three years later, Fuerte Bulnes was demolished. Archaeologists working there have now uncovered a cemetery of 12 skeletons, one of which belongs to Gauguin's father, art historian Caroline Boyle-Turner argues in a new book, per the Art Newspaper. "The scientific evidence is conclusive," says Boyle-Turner, who cites the skeleton being the only one of the 12 that belongs to a European man as one telling clue. More crucially, portions of its DNA matched a sample taken from a 68-year-old man in Tahiti who claims to be the grandson of one of Gauguin's mistresses. (Gauguin spent part of his later life in Tahiti.) A quest into the Gauguin family remains is nothing new for Boyle-Turner. The Independent in 2007 reported on her belief that four decayed teeth found in a well near Gauguin's home on the island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia belonged to the artist, with the decay being a sign of belonging to a sugar-eating foreigner's mouth. A strontium isotope analysis now reveals they belonged to someone who ate a Peruvian diet for several years during childhood, as Gauguin did. As for Gauguin's own remains, they rest in a cemetery on Hiva Oa, reports Atlas Obscura. (Gauguin wasn't just a master painter.)