Follow The Masters But Why Should

This remark comes from Gauguin's interview with the journalist Eugène Tardieu in L'Écho de Paris, 13 May 1895 — not the earlier 1891 interview as sometimes stated — and appears on p. 108 of The Writings of a Savage (1996 edition, Da Capo Press). The paradox was Gauguin's rejoinder to critics who urged artists to model themselves on past masters. By 1895 he had spent years dismantling the Impressionist conventions he had once shared, embracing flattened forms and non-naturalistic color after his encounters with Breton folk art, Japanese prints, and Polynesian imagery.