The same corporeality encountered in the 1889 Self-portrait with Halo pervades Gauguin’s later self-portraits as Christ, showing the progress of Gauguin’s savagery from maliciousness to monstrosity through the increasing physicality of his facial features. For example, in the Self-portrait in Gethsemane (Summer 1889) Gauguin depicted himself as Christ betrayed and deserted by his disciples for, as he later confessed, he had been betrayed and abandoned by his fellow artists. In an interview to the journalist Jules Huret for L’Echo de Paris, the painter explained: “There I have painted my own portrait…But it also represents the crushing of an ideal, and a pain that is both divine and human. Jesus is totally abandoned; his disciples are leaving him, in a setting as sad as his soul.” (qtd.Cachin, 161) In this fragment Gauguin compares his own suffering with that of Christ. What caused his ardent suffering was the negative response he received to his last exhibition at the Volpini Café, which he regarded as the failure of the critics to fully understand his “resigned suffering.”(qtd.Cachin, 163) 
But what exactly does he refer to when he mentions “the crushing of an ideal”? A careful analysis of the facial features present in the Self-portrait in Gethsemane will give a sense of Gauguin’s progression as a savage and demonstrate that “the crushing of an ideal” represents Gauguin’s repeated failure to elevate himself to the divine status together with his realization that the sensitive part is disappearing and allowing “the Indian one to march straight ahead firmly”. (Gauguin) An enhanced restatement of the victory of savagery and a sign that the grotesque becomes dominant, the sharply broken nose, the physical anomaly encountered in his previous portrait, is here even more accentuated. Moreover, all the other facial features undergo substantial alterations in the direction of grotesquerie and reveal yet another defeat of Gauguin’s divinity. The excessive bony structure of the face, although as prominent as before, bears completely different connotations and divulges a different side of Gauguin’s savagery. The cheekbones are not stretching the skin in a sign of malicious power, but rather the skin hangs on the bones, betraying physical weakness coupled with suffering and disillusionment. By the same token, the sharpness of the beard has faded away. His beard now looks uncouth, giving the appearance of an untamed beast, deeply submerged in misery. Thus, this intense suffering revealed by the facial traits has a dehumanizing effect on Gauguin. As a result of his psychological torment, the physical anomalies are both multiplied and further accentuated to such an extent that the grotesque becomes the hallmark of his savagery. The “crushing of an ideal” that Gauguin includes in his comments on the painting is thus an expression of his inability to make the two components of his self coexist, hence his severe agony.
The antagonism between his savagery and his divinity is further emphasized in Gauguin’s analysis of the Self-portrait in Gethsemane where he qualifies his pain as both divine and human. In the view of the symbolists , according to whom the artist represents an instrument of divine revelation, the divine component triumphed over his human pleasures and controlled them. In reality the situation was reversed and even Gauguin later accepted his intemperance and the resulting savagery. In the last three months before his death, when evaluating his life, Gauguin concluded that he was “not one of those who speak badly of life. One suffers, but one also experiences pleasure and however little it may have been, that is what one remembers.”(qtd.Kantor-Gukovskaya, 12) His ultimate statement on life subsumes his entire philosophy. The pleasures life has to offer outweigh the pains it causes. Seen in the light of his final avowal, Gauguin’s supposedly divine suffering, although undeniably present, was human, yet degrading. Furthermore, his scars could be healed by an even more human remedy: pleasures, which when taken to extremes also dehumanized him. Through these words Gauguin openly acknowledged his always having been dominated by savagery.