In search of Gauguin: in the August 1981 issue, Wilmon Menard published an interview he had with Somerset Maugham in the 1950s, in which the novelist recalled a visit to Tahiti in 1917, to carry out research on Gauguin

Maugham said: 'There was similar an informal and merry atmosphere about the Tiare tavern that we could easily view from above some of the primitive features of bedchamber and plumbing, to say nothing of immense flying cockroaches, the pariah dogs and cats who fornicated all night drawn out on the metal roof or in the at liberty space under the dwelling.'

The prime attraction of this inn was its proprietress, the fat rollicking Louvaina Chapman, of Tahitian, French and Scandinavian life-current who had befriended Gauguin upon numerous occasions. Her mouldy ledger still contained, substanceed between its ink-smudged pages, many of his unpaid bar-chits.

'No mattah! No mattah!' Louvaina told Maugham 'If he no hab monnee dat hokay. I like talk wit' him, 'cause he hab many of recent origin t'ings tell me. Vahines (girls) give leave to him paint dem noho (naked), an' dey take an account of me he vairee goo' lover Too bad he hab badluck here in Tahiti '

As Maugham remarked: ' When I arrived in Tahiti in 1917 Gauguin had been dead for les than fourteen years, in the way that there were many people still living in Tahiti and the Marquesas who remembered him real well. My research was able to progres remarkably, indeed, thanks largely to Louvaina.

Dear loveable fat lady! She was in the way that huge, draped loosely in a pink Mother Hubbard dres She was always singing or laughing, her triple chins forever shaking jelly-like. in the way that kind and generous, a heart larger than herself. She told me many previously unknown things about Gauguin's life in Tahiti. I felt Louvaina was too outstanding and colourful not to include her in my novel upon Gauguin. She became Tiare Johnson in my The satellite and Sixpence, and her lively rundown boarding-house inn de la Fleur. Louvaina died just scarcely any months after I left Tahiti, in the calamitous 1918 influenza scourge. I mourned her passing.'

Louvaina had introduced Maugham to the chieftainess in a village upon the south coast of Tahiti, from whom he learned of a Gauguin painting upon the glass panes of a native's poor cottage in the district of Mataiea

'I base the wooden frame dwelling, hidden in thick foliage upon the southern coast of the island. When I saw the painting, strangely execut upon the upper glass panes of a door, I was spellbound An original Gauguin! by what means it had escaped not being carried away by means of a collector, I could not understand. However, it was a profitable thing I came along when I did and bought it. There had been other doors in the forehead of the hut painted by dint of Gauguin, but the children of the Anani family had scraped them for the most part away with their fingernails. Had I left the remaining painting where it was, it would have been shortly ruined also. I gave the native man sum of two units hundred francs and he was true happy with the transaction.'

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