AS SEEN ON TV: METTE GAD

Lynn Redgrave passed away Sunday at the age of 67 due to breast cancer. Today's "As Seen On TV" historical figure is presented in her memory and honor....

METTE GAD

AS SEEN IN:
"Gauguin The Savage"

AS PLAYED BY:
Lynn Redgrave

From Time magazine:
Mette Gad was a Danish civil servant's daughter, a handsome, white-skinned Juno (Gauguin favored husky women) who met her fate on a jaunt to Paris in 1873. Paul Gauguin was a strapping fellow with a bull neck, a great beak of a nose, and hooded, blue-green eyes. His stockbroker's black business suit sat strangely on him because he looked like a pirate chief and walked with the rolling sway of a seaman. He had spent part of his childhood in Peru (where his mother took him to visit relatives after his journalist father died). In his teens, Paul ran away to sea and put in six years before the mast. "Oh, I was a great rascal!" he would later say, "a remarkable liar."

In the early years of marriage, painting was one of several Gauguin hobbies; he also fenced and played billiards. Mette thought Paul's pictures were very pretty and perfectly respectable (at first, they were).

The clash came when Paul began buying paintings by a group of eccentrics who were called Impressionists—Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir. They were then looked upon by the French art world as something like a bunch of nudists at a bishop's tea. By the time Mette had borne her third child, father Gauguin had joined the Impressionist club.

NOBLE SAVAGE: THE LIFE OF PAUL GAUGUIN (299 pp.)—Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson—Random House (1955)

(Lynn Redgrave as Mette is pictured here with Gauguin, played by David Carradine.)

BCnU......