Gauguin was of not more than middle height, but stockily built and of strong physical development. His hair, which later grew thinner and lost much of its coloring, was chestnut inclining towards red, and fell in large straggling masses over a broad but rather low forehead. The eye-brows were arched and gave a skeptical appearance to the eyes, which were heavy-lidded, small and gray-green in color--the eyes of one who has spent many years at sea. The nose was large, thick and aquiline. A thin drooping mustache, lighter in color than the hair, hung over the mouth, with its large, coarse lips drooping at the corners. The chin was pointed and retreating and, in later life, furnished with a short tufted beard similar in color to the mustache. After Gauguin's return from the Antilles in 1887 it is the testimony of all who knew him that his skin had become as bronzed as an Indian's, and that he dressed and looked altogether like a sailor. Even his excessive devotion to tobacco, a habit that later was seriously to injure his health, had something sailor-like in it. Gauguin rolled his own cigarettes in the Spanish fashion and smoked commonly a short clay pipe. His hands, too, were not those of an artist but of a seaman--coarse, square and red. Altogether he was in appearance curiously Creole; he did not resemble a Frenchman of France. The dark tint of his skin and the formation of the face and features belied the color of the eyes and hair. His personal characteristics were unfavorably judged by most of those with whom he came in contact. It must be remembered, however, that he was by nature reserved and even suspicious, as are many people of fundamental genius. He differed from those about him in that he worked by instinct, while they worked according to some conscious method. He therefore obtained out of himself, by means of slow thinking and laborious effort, the knowledge which many have at the beginning. Further, the study and practice of art is in itself so exhausting of physical and emotional fibre as to leave its possessor with little reserve of tact and dissimulation with which to face the world. Finally, Gauguin was shy, actually and by nature shy. People took this shyness for rudeness and this reserve for disdain. And Gauguin was not always unwilling to profit by this misunderstanding. He carefully cultivated his rudeness, both to create an effect and to keep bores at a distance. As regards his work, he was on the way to find his path, although he never entirely found it, even to the end of his career. His versatility prevented his art from ever becoming fixed and dead, like that of many popular and highly successful painters.