Paul Gauguin

Impressionism brought Gauguin the stockbroker to painting

Paul Gauguin was born on 7 June 1848 in Paris. The son of a liberal journalist and grandson of the socialist writer Flora Tristan, his family were forced to leave France in 1848 due to the February Revolution, and landed in Peru where relatives of his mother lived and who took the emigrants in. His father died on the journey there and so Paul Gauguin grew up in Peru with his older sister as a half-orphan. His life did not begin as an artist: Following the death of his mother, he served with the French navy, followed by some success as a stockbroker. It was only in 1873 that he turned to art, namely painting – against the wishes of his younger wife and under increasing financial difficulties. He visited not only the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but also the first Impressionist exhibition, and was deeply impressed, and his acquaintance with Camille Pissarro encouraged him to paint in this style. 

Friendship with van Gogh; flight to the lost paradise of the South Seas

In the Breton fishing village of Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin found a place where he could earn his first painterly laurels, granted primarily by his fellow painters gathered there. However, it did not bring him any financial success, as he also lamented in a letter to his wife, from who he had separated. In Paris, he experimented with ceramics and met the art dealer Theo van Gogh and his brother Vincent. He spent a time working in Arles with van Gogh, but there were often conflicts. It was here that the Dutch master’s self-mutilation occurred in which he cut off his ear in still unexplained circumstances. Paul Gauguin fled to the tropics, seeking the romantic paradise he had dreamed of in front of his canvas, and which he sought to artistically realise. His first sojourn in Polynesia, financed by the successful sale of paintings was sobering: the reality of the poor, grubby corrugated-iron huts had nothing to do with the exotic daydreams he presented in his pictures. He began a relationship and lived with a thirteen-year-old Tahitian girl, acquiring rudimentary language skills. 

Artistic highlight; last years in illness and poverty

Paul Gauguin returned to Paris, and again won the commendation and acceptance of his fellow painters with an exhibition of his paintings, but was met only with ridicule and rejection outside the art scene. He eventually went back to Polynesia, took a young lover, and had a son with her, Emile. During this time Paul Gauguin created his most famous work the oil painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? which he himself saw as his personal masterpiece and the high point of his creativity. It was created within a month in his self-built hut in Tahiti and can be seen as a form of artistic testament: after it was finished, Gauguin wanted to commit suicide, but the attempt with arsenic failed. The artist spent the last years of his life in his adopted paradise in abject poverty and marked by illness. 

Paul Gauguin died on 8 May 1903 in Atuona on the French-Polynesian island of Hiva Oa.