Paul Gauguin, a Post-Impressionist painter, was born in Paris on June 7, 1849, but spent his early childhood in exile with his family in Lima, Peru. In his early adult years, he did not focus solely on his painting; instead, he worked as a stockbroker's clerk in Paris and then as a merchant marine. Before the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Gauguin experimented with painting in the early 1870s. His mentor, Camille Pissarro, who he met and started working with that same year, strongly suggested he pursue a painting career. He was included in the Paris Salon exhibition every year from 1879 through 1886 after being admitted there in 1876.

Gauguin started mingling with other famous painters of the period, such as Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh. In 1887, he went to Panama and Martinique with fellow artist Charles Laval, and their journey influenced him to go to the South Pacific. Gauguin spent his last years in Paris collaborating with Synthetic and Symbolist artists and writers. He left Impressionism to seek a more radical use of color after becoming involved with avant-garde groups.

Where Do We Come From and other works by Gauguin were inspired by his time in Tahiti, which he first visited in 1881, after being influenced by his childhood in Lima and his trips to the Caribbean? That Which We Are Titled "Where Are We Going?" (1897–98, Museum of Fine Arts Boston), the painting reflects Gauguin's growing disenchantment with the Western world (he often referred to as civilization as a "sickness").

Poor health and mounting debt forced Gauguin back to France in 1883 when he unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Inheriting a substantial sum of money, the artist set up shop on the Marquesan island of Dominica, where he remained until he died in 1903. Despite spending so much time away from France, he is now widely recognized as one of the most influential painters of the nineteenth century. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel all include his artwork.

Early Years

His father was a journalist from Orléans, while his mother was of French and Peruvian ancestry. When Napoleon III staged his coup d'état in 1848, Gauguin's father packed up the family and headed for Peru, where he intended to start a newspaper. Unfortunately, he died en route, and for the next four years, Gauguin's mother raised her children on her uncle's estate in Lima before returning to France. Gauguin joined the merchant marine at seventeen and traveled for six years, during which time he visited every continent. After his mother passed away in 1867, industrialist Gustave Arosa took proper care of the family. He helped Gauguin find work as a stockbroker and eventually married the Danish lady Mette Sophie Gad in 1873. Arosa, who had works by Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-François Millet, and Émile Schuffenecker, a fellow stockbroker and painter, sparked Gauguin's interest in art. Soon after, Gauguin started attending painting classes and hanging out at a studio where he could practice drawing from life. In 1876, his painting Landscape at Viroflay was accepted into the Salon, France's premier art show. Between 1876 and 1881, he amassed a collection of works by artists including Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind. All of them were active participants in the then-contemporary avant-garde movement of Impressionism.

After meeting Pissarro about 1874, Gauguin started taking art lessons from the encouraging elder artist to improve his shaky skills. Beginning in 1880, he was often invited to participate in Impressionist exhibitions. During his studies with Pissarro and Cézanne during his vacations, he made significant strides in his painting. During this time, he also became acquainted with Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, all prominent members of the artistic avant-garde.

Gauguin lost his job when the French stock market collapsed in 1882 but regarded it as a blessing in disguise since it freed him up to "paint every day." To provide for his family, he applied for and was rejected by several art dealer positions, often to the countryside to paint with Pissarro. In 1884, he uprooted his family and settled them in Rouen, France, where he picked up odd jobs. By the end of the year, however, they had relocated to Denmark to be closer to Mette's relatives. Even though his wife's family disapproved of his artistic pursuits, Gauguin was able to return to Paris with his oldest son in the middle of 1885 to continue working on his art.

In 1886, Gauguin displayed 19 paintings beside a carved wood relief during the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition. But his works were eclipsed by Georges Seurat's massive 1884 painting, "A Sunday on the Grand Jatte" (1884–86). The following summer, frustrated and broke, Gauguin traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany, France, searching for a more straightforward and modest lifestyle. In April 1887, after enduring a harsh winter, Gauguin set off for the French Caribbean island of Martinique with fellow artist Charles Laval, where the two of them planned to "live like a savage." While in Martinique, he increasingly broke away from the Impressionist style, as shown in works like Tropical Vegetation (1887) and By the Sea (1887), which have vast, unmodulated expanses of color. After returning to France in the latter half of 1887, Gauguin pretended to be a person of exotic origin, claiming that the "primitivism" in his personality and work came from his Peruvian background.

Early Maturity

In the summer of 1888, Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven in quest of what he termed "a reasoned and open return to the beginning, that is too primal art." There, he met other young artists, including Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, looking for a more immediate way to convey their ideas on canvas. In his groundbreaking painting Vision After the Sermon (1888), Gauguin strived toward this ideal by using broad planes of color, clean lines, and simple figures. At this time, Gauguin developed the word "Synthetism" to characterize his style, which he used to describe the integration of his paintings' formal aspects with the concept or feeling they were meant to portray.

Many painters gathered at Pont-Aven looked to Gauguin as a guide; he encouraged them to paint from emotion rather than the objective observation typical of Impressionism. To be sure, he cautioned, "Don't duplicate too much after nature. When producing art, it's essential to focus on the process of making something rather than the ultimate product. Gauguin and his fellow painters of the Pont-Aven school became more ornate in their compositions and color schemes about this time. Instead of using line and color to recreate a scene, as he did as an Impressionist, Gauguin began investigating the potential of these visual techniques to evoke a specific emotional response from the spectator.

By the end of October 1888, Gauguin had made his way to Arles, in the south of France, to spend time with Vincent van Gogh (partly as a favor to van Gogh's brother, Theo, an art dealer who had promised to represent him). Van Gogh had relocated to Arles at the beginning of that year to establish the "Studio of the South," a collective of artists dedicated to producing innovative works that represent the artists' individuality. When Gauguin came, however, things quickly escalated as the two explosive artists often butted heads about art's significance. Post-Impressionism is the label given to the two men's work from this period because it demonstrates a unique, personal development of Impressionism's use of color, brushstroke, and non-traditional subject matter. Gauguin's Old Women of Arles (Mistral) (1888) depicts a parade of older women making their way solemnly across a landscape that has been flattened and created randomly. As with most of his work from this period, Gauguin heavily used thick paint on raw canvas. The artist found something close to his developing "primitive" ideal in the rough technique and the subject matter of devout peasants.

Originally, Gauguin intended to spend the spring in Arles, but his already tense friendship with van Gogh worsened. Van Gogh allegedly cut off part of his left ear after what Gauguin thought was an attempt to assault him with a razor. Gauguin packed his bags and headed back to Paris two months into his stay. Art historians Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, in Van Gogh's Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens (2008; "Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence"), argue that Gauguin mutilated van Gogh's ear with a sword rather than a razor, despite the widespread belief that the opposite is true. They reasoned that Gauguin had been protected by the artists' agreement to provide the self-mutilation version of events.

Gauguin spent the following several years commuting between Paris and Brittany. While in Paris, he met other writers and poets who were part of the Symbolist movement, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Gauguin's work was seen as an analog to the poetry of these poets who supported breaking free of the convention to express the inner emotional and spiritual life. Critic Albert Aurier classified Gauguin's work as "ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and ornamental" in a now-famous article published in the Mercure de France in 1891. Aurier proclaimed Gauguin the head of a group of painters known as the Symbolists.

Gauguin left Pont-Aven because he felt it had been ruined by visitors and settled in the little town of Le Pouldu. In an intensified search for unfiltered expression, he turned his attention to the crosses and calvaries of medieval Christianity, integrating their simple, geometric shapes into his compositions (as in The Yellow Christ) (1889). Such paintings denied the principles of perspectival space created in Western art since the Renaissance, even as they expanded on the lessons of color and brushstroke he had learned from French Impressionism. In the carved and painted wood relief Be in Love, and You Will Be Happy (1889), he conveyed his dislike for the corruption he perceived in current Western civilization, with the girl in the top left, bending to cover her body, representing Paris as a "rotten Babylon." From the looks of things, Gauguin needed to get away from it all to create his best work. Instead of going to northern Vietnam or Madagascar, where he had considered going but ultimately decided against going, he sought a grant from the French government and went to Tahiti.

Paul Gauguin's Tahiti

In June of 1891, Gauguin landed on the island of Tahiti. The book Le Mariage de Loti by Pierre Loti contributed to his idealized conception of Tahiti as a paradisal, undiscovered island (1880). After seeing how badly French colonialism had ruined Tahiti, he made an effort to immerse himself in what he thought were the genuine traditions of the island. Tahitian names such as "Near the Sea" (1892) and "The Spirit of the Dead Watching" (1892) were used, along with Oceanic iconography, pastoral scenes, and spiritual allusions. Gauguin's sculptures and woodcuts from this period take on a purposely rough-hewn appearance, emulating Oceanic traditions to distance himself from inherited Western ideals.

In July of 1893, Gauguin moved back to France, sure that his new work would finally earn him the acclaim he had been seeking. At one point, the outspoken artist assumed the role of an exotic outsider, having an infamous romance with a lady known as "Anna the Javanese." In 1894, he came up with the idea to write and self-publish a book on his time in Tahiti under Noa Noa, complete with woodcut illustrations. However, he had little success with this endeavor and an individual exhibition at the Paul Durand-Ruel gallery, so he finally departed France for Tahiti in July 1895.

In his work before the 1890s, Gauguin flattened his images to mixed effects. However, his "primitivism" grew more natural as the decade progressed. Gauguin's imagery became lusher and naturally lyrical as he established magnificently coordinated tonal harmonies, partly due to his adoption of J.-A.-D. Ingres and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes' penchant for rounded and molded figures and a curved line. In his seminal Tahitian work, Where Do We Come From, published in 1897, he perfectly captured the essence of his evolving perspective? That Which We Are What's the Plan? (1897). The work is enveloped by a stunning mystical, lyrical atmosphere. An extensive study of life and death is conveyed via a sequence of characters, from a newborn infant to a withered old lady.

Gauguin, dismayed by the increasing Western influence in the French colony, left in September 1901 for the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in search of a more isolated setting. He bought some property in the area and, with the aid of his neighbors, constructed a house he dubbed "the house of pleasure." The home was likely influenced by Maori sculptures he saw in Auckland, New Zealand, and was conceived as a whole work of art embellished with beautifully carved friezes. As his movement was severely limited by syphilis by 1902, he focused on his art and writing, notably his autobiography, Avant et après (published posthumously in 1923). Having gotten into an argument with the French government, he pondered migrating again, this time to Spain, but his deteriorating health and ongoing litigation prevented him from doing so. He was found dead in his own "home of pleasure."

Paul Gauguin's Inheritance

The range and magnitude of Gauguin's impact were remarkable. His abrupt break with modern society favoring a more spiritual, accessible way of living is a significant element of his legacy. The key is also in his continuous testing. Although he has long been associated with several schools of thought, the difficulty in categorizing his body of work, especially his last pieces, is a testament to the singularity of his vision. A new generation of painters was influenced by the innovations of Gauguin and his colleagues Cézanne and van Gogh. In 1889 and 1890, several of Gauguin's teenage followers at Pont-Aven used his ideas to develop the Nabis movement. Edvard Munch, a Norwegian painter, owes a great deal to Gauguin's use of line. The Fauve artists, especially Henri Matisse, benefited from his use of color in their innovative compositions. Some German Expressionists, notably Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, also showed a clear debt to Gauguin. The adolescent Pablo Picasso was profoundly influenced by Gauguin's use of Oceanic imagery and his artistic simplifications, leading to the artist's later love of African art and the development of Cubism. Gauguin paved the ground for the evolution of 20th-century painting through his innovative use of style and his rejection of empirical depiction in favor of conceptual representation.

Most paintings Paul Gauguin did are about Landscape, People, Still life, Portrait, Nude, Seascape, Cityscape, and other subjects.

Most of the artist's works that can be seen by the public today are now kept in museums like Musée d'Orsay, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek - Copenhagen, The State Hermitage Museum - St Petersburg, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art - Washington DC, and others.

Famous Paul Gauguin period artists include Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 -1919), John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 -1925), Eugène-Louis Boudin (French, 1824 -1898), Claude Monet (French, 1840 -1926), Camille Pissarro (French, 1830 -1903), Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853 -1890), Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (Russian, 1817 -1900), Alfred Sisley (French, 1839 -1899), Sir John Lavery, R.A. (Irish, 1856 -1941), William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 -1916), Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 -1906), Odilon Redon (French, 1840 -1916), and others.

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