In my book Guys like Gauguin, I look at the lives and work of some of the artists and writers who travelled to live and work in Tahiti in the 1920s.

Paul Engdahl

Engdahl was born in the small historic city of Kristinehamn in Sweden in 1888. As a young man he joined the Rackstad art colony who were at the forefront of a new Swedish art movement, National Romanticism, which focused on nature, Nordic folklore and national identity.

He arrived in Tahiti in the early 1920s and Robert Keable wrote about him in 1923 in his penultimate chapter of his book Tahiti, Isle of Dreams.

I have a friend whose story, simple as it is, will serve. He was once wealthy by inheritance and a painter for pleasure. A few years ago he was ruined quite completely. He faced his poverty with a brave heart and left Europe, for he knew not what land in which to labour for his living. The tramp steamer on which he was given passage touched Canada, the States, Australia, but he stayed in none. In time he made Tahiti. A native… offered him for nothing a simple hut on a point by the sea among the coconuts in which to rest and paint and learn Tahiti. After some months he was able to acquire a tangled tropic valley in a remote district, and he moved there unhesitatingly. He lives now in a small bamboo and pandanus house; he has planted, and is planting coconuts, avocado pears, vanilla and other things in clearings he makes with the utmost of toil and battle; his skin is as brown as a native’s; his food for weeks but theirs – plantains, taro, bread-fruit. He has been poor enough not to be able to buy a tin of dripping in which to fry bananas. He paints when he is not to physically tired, which is not often yet. He is alone except for a few natives and one white neighbour. When he makes a month the wages of my Chinese cook he counts himself a lucy man, and that he does by harvesting his banana or orange crop at great labour for the Papeete native market.  

Yet he is more than a happy man. I think it is honestly true to say that he is glad he lost his fortune. … He has found what I dimly sense. He is not an extravagant poet or a wild man of the woods; he has not in any way ‘gone native’, living with or on a native woman; he has not forgotten his education or lost his manners. But he has found something, he has been tested by something, he has been accepted by something.

Engdahl stayed in Tahiti until 1935. He continued to paint but also began to design textiles, both pāreus, and wall hangings. After some time in Mexico and America he returned to Sweden having a major exhibition of his fabrics in 1945. He died in 1976

Main room of his exhibition at the Östergötland Museum, Linköping, 1945