Paradise lost

摘要

Since the days of Captain Cook, uninvited visitors to the South Pacific islands have introduced the locals to venereal disease, radioactive contamination and Sunday school. They have also created a fascinating but little studied building type - the artist's house in paradise. Remnants of one of the most celebrated works in this genre, Paul Gauguin's House of Pleasure on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, are on display in the wonderful Gauguin Tahiti 100th anniversary exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts following its huge hit at the Grand Palais in Paris last autumn. Reliable scholarship on the colonial architecture of the South Pacific is hard to come by. As far as I can tell, the characteristic South Seas house style originated in a fusion of indigenous materials and dwellings with the colonial bungalow type and whatever.happened to arrive on passing ships. Jack London got the bricollage just about right in his 1909 story The House of Mapuhi, when he 'described a newly wealthy islander's dream of a residence like those of the missionaries and traders: 'It must have a roof of galvanized iron and an octagondrop-clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A big room must be in the center, with a round table in the middle of it and the octagon-drop-clock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side of the big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a washstand. And back of the house must be a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots and pans and a stove.'