Reading art history can be like watching paint dry: X studied under the distinguished Professor Y at the Académie de ZZZ. Scandal can pique the reader’s interest – the numberless offspring, the surreptitious machinations to support the artist’s prices. But the details are now likely to be accompanied by finger-wagging commentary, as if we didn’t already know that these things are problematic, and as if we were remotely capable of reaching a consensus about what to do with the bad men (they usually are men) of art.

You approach a biography of Paul Gauguin recalling that he kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in Tahiti and was accused of ransacking Polynesian culture for motifs and branding the locals ‘savages’. At the last major exhibition of his work in the UK, the National Gallery’s ‘Gauguin Portraits’ in 2019, visitors were invited to consider, ‘Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?’

No doubt many have decided to do just that, but Sue Prideaux’s revealing – and unflagging – narrative persuades this reviewer that he’s well worth reconsidering. She makes good use of a newly rediscovered manuscript of Gauguin’s memoir, Avant et après, which had been missing for a century, though she