According to The Manchester Guardian review of 1919 (here quoted and contains spoilers) "Mr. Maugham has followed a recognised convention in this story of an imaginary artist of posthumous greatness. He treats him throughout with mock respect, and surrounds his affairs with contributory detail. Mr. Maugham's story is that of a respectable stockbroker who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage and goes alone to Paris to follow a new ideal - the ideal of great and for a time unrecognisable art. The break is succeeded by privation and industry, by long periods of work and outbursts of savage sexual conquest; and the artist at length dies, blind and leprous, in Tahiti". The book is told by a narrator and is said to be based on the life of the French 20th century painter Paul Gauguin.