Modern Age
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
French Post-Impressionism painter.
Paul Gauguin came late and violently to art. Born in Paris, raised partly in Peru, a merchant sailor and then a successful Paris stockbroker, he collected and painted as an amateur before the crash of 1882 and his own conviction pushed him to abandon career and family for painting. Under Camille Pissarro he began as an Impressionist, but he soon rejected its patient transcription of nature. At Pont-Aven in Brittany, with Émile Bernard, he forged Synthetism: flat zones of non-naturalistic color bounded by firm outlines, an art of memory, symbol, and idea rather than optical fact.
Restless and mythologizing, Gauguin sought what he imagined as a purer, 'primitive' life beyond European civilization, and in 1891 sailed for Tahiti. It is essential to see this clearly: Tahiti was already a French colony, its culture disrupted by decades of missionary and colonial rule, and the unspoiled paradise Gauguin painted was largely his own invention. His celebrated Tahitian canvases — glowing, flat, and grave — draw on Polynesian motifs he half-understood and half-imagined, and his life there, including relationships with adolescent Tahitian girls, is now rightly seen as exploitative. His book 'Noa Noa' blends genuine observation with outright fiction, a self-made legend as much as a record.
Sick, poor, and embattled, Gauguin painted his vast summa 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' in 1897–98 before a suicide attempt, and died in 1903 in the Marquesas. However troubling the man, his liberation of color and line from description — pursued alongside and against his friend Vincent van Gogh, with whom he shared a stormy autumn in Arles in 1888 — helped open the road to Symbolist, Nabi, and Fauve painting and to modern art's freedom from the visible.
The words the record keeps using: symbolic, primal, grave, sensuous, mythic, restless.
At a glance
- Lived 1848–1903
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris, Arles, Tahiti
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Post-Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Polychrome woodblock print
Works in the archive
- Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888 (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh)
Breton women in white bonnets, having just heard a sermon, see in their mind's eye the biblical struggle of Jacob and the angel wrestling in a field. Painted at Pont-Aven in 1888, it is the breakthrough of Synthetism:… - Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), 1891 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Gauguin transplants the Christian Annunciation to Tahiti: a Polynesian Mary carries a haloed child on her shoulder while two women bow in worship and a winged angel looks on, all amid tropical fruit and flowers. Painted… - Tahitian Women on the Beach, 1891 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Two Tahitian women sit close on the sand, one in a bright missionary-introduced dress, the other in a Polynesian pareu, absorbed and monumental. Painted in Gauguin's first Tahitian year, it turns two ordinary figures… - Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Gauguin's largest and most ambitious canvas, painted in Tahiti in 1897–98 while sick and destitute, and, he claimed, before an attempt on his own life. Read from right to left, it moves from a sleeping infant to figures…
What was said
Writing to his friend Émile Schuffenecker, Gauguin advised against copying nature too closely, calling art an abstraction to be drawn out of nature by dreaming in its presence, and urging that thought be given more to the act of creation than to the result — the credo behind his flat, symbolic color.
Gauguin cast his departure for Tahiti as a flight from a Europe he found exhausted and artificial toward what he imagined as a simpler, more instinctive source for his art — a self-mythologizing account set down in his letters and in 'Noa Noa'.
Recent scholarship stresses that the Tahiti Gauguin painted was already a disrupted French colony rather than an untouched paradise, that 'Noa Noa' mixes fact with invention, and that his relationships with adolescent Tahitian girls were exploitative — reframing the celebrated 'primitivism' as a European colonial projection.
Lineage
Passed on to Vincent van Gogh
What would Paul make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Paul Gauguin", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Paul · Keep a life moment the way Paul would · Pictures made after Paul