The Moon and Sixpence Study Guide

W. Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 in Paris, France, where his father Robert Ormond Maugham worked as a lawyer at the British Embassy. Maugham had three older brothers. In 1882, Maugham’s mother died of tuberculosis; in 1884, his father died as well, and Maugham was sent to live in England with his uncle. Maugham attended a private high school called King’s College, Canterbury in the UK but matriculated at Heidelberg University in Germany for college. After graduating university, he returned to the UK and attended medical school from 1892 to 1897. Also in 1897, he published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth. Rather than work as a doctor, Maugham became a full-time writer of both novels and plays. In 1907, his comedy play Lady Frederick became an unexpected smash hit, vaulting Maugham to literary fame. In 1914, he began an affair with a woman named Syrie Wellcome, though he was primarily interested in men. In 1915, they had a child, and he published his autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, now considered his masterpiece. During World War I (1914–1918), he worked for the British Secret Service. In 1917, he married Syrie Wellcome, but throughout most of the 1920s they lived apart—Maugham was traveling abroad with his longtime lover Frederick Gerald Haxton—and divorced in 1929. Afterward, he lived variously in France, the U.S., and the UK. He died in Nice, France in 1965 after a bad fall.

The Moon and Sixpence bases its central character, Charles Strickland, on real-life French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Like Strickland, Paul Gauguin worked as a stockbroker while trying to teach himself to paint on the side, left wife and children to pursue a painting career, moved to Tahiti to paint, and subsequently had sexual relationships with Tahitian teenage girls (an incident mirrored in The Moon and Sixpence by Strickland’s marriage to 17-year-old Ata). Also like Strickland, Gauguin was not particularly successful until after his death. Yet unlike Strickland—who is portrayed as a solitary figure uninterested in exhibiting his own work or in contemporary artistic movements—Gauguin was close to Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and allowed some of his own paintings to be exhibited with other Impressionists before moving on to Post-Impressionist styles. W. Somerset Maugham, who visited Tahiti in 1914, met with and interviewed people who had personally known Gauguin—much as the narrator of The Moon and Sixpence meets with and interviews Strickland’s former acquaintances in Tahiti.

The Moon and Sixpence is a Künstlerroman, a novel about an artist’s development. Perhaps one of the earliest Künstlerroman is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), about a young man who flees a sordid commercial life for more artistic pursuits. Goethe’s novel may have influenced The Moon and Sixpence. Famous Künstlerromans published in the same Modernist literary period as The Moon and Sixpence include Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and W. Somerset Maugham’s own autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915). It’s worth nothing, though, that The Moon and Sixpence is distinct from all these novels in that its artist-protagonist, Charles Strickland, is not young but middle-aged when he begins his journey of artistic self-discovery. Finally, The Moon and Sixpence is a fictionalized treatment of the life of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Another novel that retells Paul Gauguin’s life is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2003), though that novel explicitly takes Gauguin as a character, whereas The Moon and Sixpence transmutes Gauguin’s life experience into that of fictional English painter Charles Strickland.