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Every human work is a revelation of the individual. Hence, there are two kinds of beauty; one comes from instinct, the other from labor. The union of the two—with the modification resulting therefrom—produces great and very complicated richness.... Raphael’s great science does not for a moment prevent me from discovering the instinct of the beautiful in him as the essential quality.

In 1895 there was a sale of Gauguin’s works at the Hotel Drouot. Strindberg was asked to write a preface to the catalogue. In declining, he admitted his own “immense yearning to become a savage and create a new world,” but said of Gauguin’s world, “it is too sunny for me, the lover of chiaroscuro. And in your Eden dwells an Eve, who is not my ideal—for indeed, I too, have a feminine ideal, or two.”

Gauguin answered,

Your civilization is your disease, my barbarism is my restoration to health. The Eve of your civilized conception makes us nearly all misogynists. The old Eve, who shocked you in my studio, will perhaps seem less odious to you some day. I have perhaps been unable to do more than suggest my world, which seems unreal to you. It is a far cry from the sketch to the realisation of the dream. But even the suggestion of the happiness is like a foretaste of Nirvana—only the Eve I have painted can stand naked before us. Yours would always be shameless in the natural state, and, if beautiful, the source of pain and evil.[22]