The Moon and Sixpence

One day, Charles Strickland announces to his family and friends, “I want to paint.”


He has an unquenchable desire to create art.  


His life is too oppressive to endure any longer.


Charles Strickland is a respected stockbroker; a man of wealth and privilege (clearly modeled after Paul Gauguin the post-impressionist painter).


As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he relinquishes his bourgeois life, family,  and social status and flees London for Paris and Tahiti, leaving the lives of those around him in ruins.  


Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in human lives it sometimes demands.


Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the all-powerful forces behind creative genius—that Promethean fire in the soul that propels the artist forward while at the same time invites his doom.



W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1874-1965), transformed the art of fiction. Author of numerous novels, plays, and short stories, including The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, and Of Human Bondage, he is considered to be a literary colossus, and a central figure in the development of the modern novel.



“Deep and profound, disturbing and fascinating, concise and exhaustive–as only Maugham could write…”

-Waldstein