The Moon and Sixpence, novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1919. It was loosely based on the life of French artist Paul Gauguin.
The novel’s hero, Charles Strickland, is a London stockbroker who renounces his wife, children, and business in order to paint. In Paris, Strickland woos and wins a friend’s wife away just so that he can paint her; when she kills herself, he is seemingly unaffected but leaves Paris, later settling in Tahiti with a young native woman.