Paul Gauguin Painting Reproductions 2 of 8

Paul Gauguin is a French post-impressionist painter (Paris, 1848 - Atuona, Marquesas Islands, 1903).

A traveller at heart, Paul Gauguin's artistic career was a transition between Impressionism and Symbolism. Through his forms and colors, he was a decisive influence on the Fauvist and Expressionist painters.

From his early childhood in Peru, Paul Gauguin retained his taste for the unfamiliar. In 1865 he joined the navy, but on the advice of his tutor Gustave Arosa (a collector of paintings) he left in 1871 to work for a Parisian securities broker.

Married in 1873 to the Danish Mette-Sophie Gadd, by whom he had five children, he painted on Sundays and attended the academy founded by the Italian Filippo Colarossi. Camille Pizarro, a friend of Arosa's, advised and encouraged him to participate in Impressionist exhibitions from 1879; he then invited him to work in Pontoise with Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne, whose example encouraged Gauguin to break away from Impressionism.

In late 1883, driven out of the bourse by the economic crisis, Gauguin first tried to support himself by painting in Rouen, where Pissarro and Claude Monet maintained contacts with wealthy art lovers, before deciding to set up business in Denmark. He was unsuccessful and returned to Paris in 1885 without wife and children. His fate was preordained: for years he continued to dream of business, but painting became his life.

On his return from his first trip to Pont-Aven in 1886, Gauguin exhibited the paintings he had brought back, along with those from the Rouen and Denmark periods, with their rich, muted tones.

In the following year, during his stay in Martinique, where he tried his hand at planting, he painted discreetly pointillist canvases in which the exoticism and colour that his memories of Peru and his sea voyages had imprinted on his memory (Seashore) emerge.

Gauguin's second visit to Pont-Aven was in 1888. Long discussions with the young Emile Bernard gave rise to a new aesthetic that contrasted neo-impressionism with synthetism (pure colours laid flat, dark rings), of which Vision after the Sermon (1888) - or Jacob's Struggle with the Angel - is the most obvious work.

During this period Gauguin became a leader of the Symbolist school, and from November to December 1888 he spent a break in Arles with Vincent Van Gogh and produced a series of brilliant canvases ('Aliscamps'). Gauguin left Van Gogh after the latter suffered a severe attack of madness. La Belle Angèle (1889) and Le Christ vert (1889) reflect the plastic and moral problems of this period, which was followed by his first trip to Tahiti (1891-1893).

Paul Gauguin's life was divided between Europe and the tropics. It was Polynesia that gave him a new creative force, making him the first great artist to appreciate and study the arts we now call "primitive", and then hand over the keys to them to the West.

"I am going away to calm myself, to free myself from the influence of civilization," Gauguin declared before setting sail for Tahiti in the spring of 1891. "For this purpose I must immerse myself in the virgin nature [...] without any other care than to transmit, like a child, the conceptions of my brain by means of the primitive means of art alone, the only good, the only true ones."

In Tahiti, Gauguin discovered the relatively pristine world of his dreams (Femmes de Tahiti, 1891). But fearing both intrigue and oblivion, he returned to Paris as soon as he had enough new paintings to participate in an exhibition with Durand-Ruel.

After seeing his works, Stéphane Malarmé is astonished to find "so many mysteries in so much brilliance." Not only writers, including August Strindberg and Charles Morris, with whom he wrote his autobiography Noa-Noa (1897), but also musicians came to his studio.

However, financial success came slowly. He lost a lawsuit, there was a brawl in Concarneau where sailors taunted his companion Ana la Javan, and Gauguin, fed up with Europe, left for Tahiti in 1895.

In Polynesia, the confused religiosity of Breton works gave way to great myths (pleasure, fear, death) and massive forms in saturated colours. The joy of returning to one's roots floods the paintings of 1896 (Jours délicieux), and then grief creeps in (Nevermore, 1897).

Suffering and depressed by the news of his daughter Aline's death, Gauguin contemplates suicide. Where do we come from? What are we? Where Are We Going (1897) became his testament.

The renewed enthusiasm that followed his move to the village of Atuona on the island of Hiva-Oa in the Marquesas (1901) produced masterpieces that convey his sense of a paradisiacal universe (Contes barbares, 1902). Gauguin also created sculptures. But exhausted by illness, alcohol and constant disputes with local authorities, he died shortly before the age of 55.