If Paul Gauguin, leaning across his celestial easel, had happened to glance down at that moment, he’d have cracked a cynical smile.

Twenty Americans in vibrant Tommy Hilfiger leisurewear, hands gripping state-of-the-art Olympus cameras, swarmed across his grave site on a slope high above the Pacific. They had panted up the hill from the village of Atuona, on Hiva Oa in the remote Marquesas Islands, to the little cemetery where Gauguin has lain for 103 years in a grave of ugly black boulders marked with his own statue of a wild woman, Oviri, Tahitian for savage.

The Americans grappled for position, some with one foot up on the modest headstone and a triumphant grin, as though they’d just bagged a trophy lion. I’m not sure they knew much about Gauguin, except that his paintings sold for millions at places like Sotheby’s and he’d run off to the South Seas to paint pubescent girls after first seducing them.

And yet Gauguin could scarcely sell a picture during his lifetime. Here was the painter who rejected the “disease” of civilisation, who fled Europe and even Tahiti in his search for his ideal of the noble, savage state. Now, rich folks from the west were fighting each other to videotape his grave.

The Marquesas, an archipelago of 12 high, wooded islands, are among the most remote pinpricks of land in the world, about 900 miles northeast of Tahiti and 4,000 miles from the nearest continent, South America. Even in today’s French Polynesia they are regarded as the back of beyond, but their beauty is legend: the bold, rock-bound coasts where surf beats against towering cliffs; the secret interiors dominated by mountains swathed in swirling cloud, where there are Tabu temples half-suffocated by jungle, and stone gods almost as massive as those on Easter Island.

Remote was what Gauguin wanted. He arrived in Hiva Oa in 1901 on the steamer Croix de Sud, after six days’ sailing from Tahiti. He unloaded his canvases and trunks into a native canoe and was rowed ashore. He had conned the Catholic church into believing he’d repent his dissolute ways, so it agreed to sell him a 700-franc piece of beachfront. Here he built his studio out of bamboo and palm fronds, calling it Maison du Jouir, the house of pleasure — which kind of gave the game away. Beside the entrance he carved “Be amorous and you will be happy”.

WE ARRIVED here the same way Gauguin did. His steamer anchored in the same bay, Baie de Tahauku, so that he could land in the village of Atuona. There was no harbour then and there isn’t still. We sailed in on the Aranui III, an 8,000-ton freighter that voyages monthly to these lonely islands to unload supplies. It also takes passengers.

When Gauguin set foot on Hiva Oa, the natives viewed his long hair and velvet suits with mirth. Today, they are very organised in the art of playing host to Europeans and Americans. A little ukelele band on the quay heralds our whaler, smiling children drape garlands of gardenia around our necks, and we are invited to clamber into Toyota 4WDs so that we might be carried like a conquering army to the village.

Gauguin is big business in Atuona. A guide points out the wooden colonial store where he bought his rum and turps. Inside, they sell Gauguin tropical biscuits and Gauguin perfume. Across the road is a faithful replica of La Maison de Jouir, and a Gauguin museum lined with forgeries of his most famous paintings.

Here I met his great-great-granddaughter, or one of them (he fathered countless children; his favourite age for a mistress was 13), a handsome woman with a gardenia headband who proudly showed me a copy of Gauguin’s portrait of her ancestor. Stupidly I asked her name. She said it was Tevahinuwaatuaiteruru a Teanau — “but you can call me Josette”.

Atuona forgot Gauguin almost as soon as he was buried, but latterly the village has done rather well out of him. It is trim and prosperous, with a small military base and airfield, one luxury hotel, the Hanakee Hiva Oa Pearl Lodge, and comfortable bungalow pensions to accommodate visitors drawn by his legend. One of them, the Belgian singer Jacques Brel, is also buried here.

When the Aranui drops anchor and the passengers descend, the natives set up stalls heaped with wood carvings and colourful pareus, and do terrific trade. So do the restaurants, with their signature dish of wild pig baked in an earth oven.

Until quite recently, civilisation stopped just beyond La Maison de Jouir. But now you can make a two-hour ride to Lapona, through forests of palm and mountains shaped like witches’ hats, to visit an awesome ancient marae, a temple reclaimed from the jungle. There are five giant Tiki gods here — squat, ugly, frog-faced stone effigies, somehow made even more demonic by the chopping off of their grotesque penises, an act performed by offended missionaries decades ago.

GAUGUIN WOULD not have approved. But whatever the enduring worth of his colour-saturated paintings of naked, beautiful, almost expressionless Tahitian wahines, perhaps his greatest value to our modern age is not as a painter at all.

He was a failed stockbroker, and there can hardly be a City worker hunched over their computer who doesn’t dream of fleeing their responsibilities and escaping to a desert island to pursue a life of indolence and pleasure. Paul Gauguin dared to make that leap, and he stands as a metaphor for the possibility of change; for personal reinvention.

When Gauguin died penniless on May 8, 1903, Hiva Oa’s priest seized his remaining canvases and burnt them in public as “the obscenities of a sad character, enemy of God and all that is honest”. God knows what they would be worth today, but Paul Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, recently paid £20m for Maternity, a pretty average example of his art.

I think all this has escaped Rita and Elaine of New York City, as we head back to the Aranui. They appear more interested in handicrafts. Rita has bought a native wooden paddle for the wall of her apartment in TriBeCa, which she reckons will be the most impressive paddle seen in Manhattan since the Indians sold the island to the Dutch.

Before boarding the whaler to surf back to the ship, she pauses: “If I headed back to the shop now, there wouldn’t be anybody there and we could get stuff wholesale.”

She sounds like a character in a Neil Simon play. You can take the girl out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the girl. She hasn’t mentioned Gauguin all day.

Travel details: the Aranui (www.aranui.com) sails monthly from Tahiti to the Marquesas, carrying cargo plus up to 200 passengers. The front half is cranes and containers, while the stern is devoted to cabins, sun decks and a swimming pool. The 14-day voyage can be booked through Strand Travel (020 7766 8220, www.strand travel.co.uk) and costs from £2,770pp, full board. Expect to pay about £900 for Air New Zealand (0800 028 4149, www.airnewzealand.co.uk) flights from Heathrow to Tahiti, via Los Angeles, also bookable through Strand Travel.

For information on the islands, call 020 7202 6378 or visit www.tahiti-tourisme.co.uk.

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