The Moon and Sixpence recap

The narrator recalls Charles Strickland, a conventional London stockbroker who abruptly abandons his wife and children for Paris, not for another woman but to paint. Strickland accepts hunger, illness, and hostility with indifference, caring only for his work. The kindly painter Dirk Stroeve recognizes his genius and nurses him, but Strickland takes Stroeve's wife Blanche and then abandons her; she kills herself. Years later Strickland drifts through Marseilles and reaches Tahiti, where he lives remotely with a young woman named Ata. Afflicted by leprosy and eventually blind, he covers their house with an immense final sequence of paintings. After he dies, Ata honors his command to burn the house, so the masterpiece is destroyed. Strickland becomes famous after death, while the narrator is left weighing artistic greatness against the human damage caused by his absolute refusal of social and moral claims.

The narrator begins by considering the legend that has formed around the dead painter Charles Strickland and the difficulty of separating a celebrated artist from the man he knew. Years earlier, the narrator enters the London literary circle cultivated by Amy Strickland. Her husband Charles is a dull-seeming stockbroker, middle-aged, quiet, and apparently settled in a conventional marriage with two children. Nothing about his manners or interests suggests artistic ambition. Amy values writers and social distinction, while Charles seems merely to tolerate the gatherings. The narrator's retrospective knowledge makes this ordinary first impression striking: the man later praised for fierce originality initially appears to have no inner life worth noticing.

Charles Strickland suddenly leaves London for Paris. Amy and her relatives assume he has run away with a woman, and the narrator agrees to find him and urge him home. He discovers Strickland living alone in a cheap hotel, unconcerned with comfort, reputation, or his family's distress. Strickland explains that he intends to paint and shows no interest in defending himself or arranging financial support for his wife and children. He refuses every appeal to affection, duty, shame, and prudence. The narrator realizes there is no mistress and no ordinary scandal: Strickland has discarded his former life because painting has become an absolute necessity to him. Amy must accept that he will not return and begins rebuilding her life without him.

Years later, the narrator encounters Strickland among the poor artists of Paris. Strickland lives in extreme deprivation and remains indifferent to sales, praise, friendship, and physical hardship. His pictures are difficult and largely dismissed, but the cheerful Dutch painter Dirk Stroeve insists that they reveal genius. Stroeve is a successful producer of sentimental art and is frequently mocked, yet his judgment of Strickland is serious and perceptive. His wife Blanche intensely dislikes Strickland and resists having anything to do with him. When Strickland becomes dangerously ill, Dirk's compassion overcomes her objections: he brings the sick man into their studio and nurses him with devoted care, creating a tense dependence inside the Stroeves' home.

After recovering in the Stroeves' studio, Strickland forms a relationship with Blanche. She rejects Dirk, forces him from his own home, and stays with Strickland despite having previously feared and hated him. Dirk remains willing to forgive her, but Strickland soon tires of the affair and abandons Blanche without remorse. Unable to return to her husband and unable to endure Strickland's rejection, she drinks a corrosive poison and dies after terrible injuries. Dirk is devastated. Strickland treats the death as irrelevant to his work and paints a nude portrait of Blanche that persuades Dirk once again of his genius. The episode leaves the narrator appalled by the human cost of Strickland's complete emotional detachment, while Dirk ultimately leaves Paris.

Strickland disappears from the narrator's direct experience. Much later, the narrator meets Captain Nichols, a shabby sailor in Marseilles who remembers sharing Strickland's poverty in the port. Nichols describes a life of casual labor, hunger, drink, and conflict, with Strickland still fixed on painting and ready to move on whenever circumstances permit. The account fills part of the gap between Paris and the South Pacific but also shows how every witness reshapes Strickland according to personal interests. Strickland eventually finds passage away from Europe. The narrator later travels to Tahiti, where the painter's last and most productive years have already become part of local memory.

In Tahiti, the narrator hears from the hotelkeeper Tiare Johnson that Strickland felt immediately at home on the island. Tiare arranged for him to live with Ata, a young Tahitian woman who offered companionship, food, and an undemanding household. The pair moved to an isolated place where Strickland could paint without interference. Ata accepted his poverty and difficult nature, and they had children. For the first time, his surroundings matched his desire to work outside European society. The narrator also meets Doctor Coutras, whose knowledge of Strickland's final illness points toward the fate of the paintings made in this remote home.

Strickland contracts leprosy and becomes increasingly isolated, with Ata remaining beside him. Even after the disease leaves him blind, he continues to paint. Following his death, Doctor Coutras enters the house and sees that Strickland has transformed its walls into a single immense painted vision, the culmination of his lifelong effort. Strickland had instructed Ata to burn the house, and she faithfully does so, destroying the work. Back in London, the narrator visits Amy Strickland, who now presents herself as the widow of a great painter and decorates her respectable home with reproductions. Their son and daughter have entered conventional adult lives. Strickland's fame has returned to the social world he rejected, but his final masterpiece survives only in one witness's memory, leaving unresolved the moral balance between his achievement and his cruelty.

In Tahiti, Strickland settles with Ata in an isolated house and paints in conditions that leave him free from the social claims he has always rejected. He contracts leprosy and gradually loses his sight, yet continues working. When Doctor Coutras visits after Strickland's death, he finds the walls of the house covered by a vast painted vision that seems to gather Strickland's lifelong search into a single extraordinary achievement. Strickland had ordered Ata to burn the house after he died, and she obeys, destroying the murals. The narrator returns to London and visits Amy Strickland, who has built a tasteful domestic display around reproductions of her husband's now fashionable work. Strickland's children have grown into respectable adults, and the ordinary family world he abandoned has absorbed his fame without ever sharing the ruthless impulse that created it.