Adrian Hermann Gouwe

Born in Alkmaar Holland on May 8th 1875, Gouwe was a student of G. Sturme de Allebe and of Van der Waay at the Royal Academy of Beaux Arts in Amsterdam. He was awarded the Rome prize laureate for painting in Holland 1901. He travelled for three years throughout Spain, Italy and Morocco. At fifty two years of age he chanced to read in a Toulon newspaper an article about Tahiti written by a sea capitan which convinced him to give adventure a shot. He landed in Papeete in 1927 and spent the first few weeeks touring the island by foot. He stayed six months in Pirae where the kindness and hospitality of its inhabitants won him over. Wishing to discover the surrounding islands he checked into the Hotel Fontana in Raiatea where the owner, upon discovering that Gouwe was a painter, exclaimed: "You are an artist... Artists do not pay here!" He passed four years in Tahaa before establishing a home in Hanua, Raiatea, about twenty kilometers from Uturoa where he built a small house for himself. He lived there simply in a Tahitien manner. In the thirty one years that he lived overseas, Gouwe slept on boards rather than a mattresss, a thing he often laughed about saying, "I have as many corns on my backside as I do on the bottom of my feet".
The first exhibit of Gouwe's work took place in Papeete in 1935. The Hotel Stuart presented his work again in 1940, as did the Tropiques in 1951 and Papeete's Town Hall school in 1956. He left Tahiti briefly in 1959 to spend a few months in Europe, exhibiting in June at the municipal museuum of Amsterdam and again at the academy Jean Van Eyck in Maestricht in August. During World War II, Gouwe sent one hundred and fifteen watercolors to Holland's consulate in New Zeland to be sold with the profits going to benefit a Free Holland. Stricken with cataracts, Gouwe was operated on with sucess and was able to continue painting. A man of utmost simplicity Gouwe was both artist and philosopher, much of his later work in the field of abstract art can be credited to this philosophic outlook. Gouwe died in Tahiti on December 28th 1965. His friend Franck Fay, dedicated an illustrated plaque to his memory in Papeete in 1966.