Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, in the middle of a year of revolution across Europe. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a liberal journalist; his mother, Aline Chazal, was the daughter of Flora Tristan, a French and Peruvian writer and early socialist activist ^[1]. In 1849, fearing political reprisals under the new government of Louis Napoleon, the family sailed for Peru. Clovis died of a heart attack during the voyage, and Aline arrived in Lima a widow with two small children ^[2].

The Gauguins spent several years in Lima among the wealthy relatives of Aline's Peruvian family. Paul later credited these childhood years in South America with giving him a lasting taste for places far from France, and the memory of Peru surfaced repeatedly in his later search for what he called more primitive ways of life ^[1]. The family returned to France around 1855, settling in Orléans, where Paul attended school and proved an indifferent student.

At seventeen he went to sea, first as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine and later in the French navy, voyaging between Europe and South America ^[2]. His mother died in 1867 while he was away. Her friend Gustave Arosa, a businessman and photographer with a serious art collection, became the young man's guardian. Arosa's collection, which included works by Delacroix and Courbet, gave Gauguin his first sustained exposure to painting ^[3].

In 1872 Arosa found Gauguin a position at the Paris stock exchange, where he prospered as a broker's agent. The following year he married Mette Sophie Gad, a young Danish woman, and over the next decade the couple had five children ^[1]. Outwardly Gauguin was a comfortable bourgeois. Privately he had begun to paint on Sundays, buy Impressionist pictures, and spend time with artists, above all Camille Pissarro, who became his informal teacher ^[3].

His progress was rapid for an amateur. A landscape was accepted at the official Salon of 1876, and Pissarro arranged for him to exhibit with the Impressionists, which he did in their group shows from 1879 through 1886 ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Paul Gauguin in 1880 would have received the answer: a stockbroker who collected and painted in the Impressionist manner.

The French financial crash of 1882 ended his career in finance. Gauguin decided to paint full time, a choice that quickly consumed his savings. In 1884 the family moved to Rouen to economize, then to Copenhagen to live near Mette's relatives. The arrangement failed. Gauguin returned to Paris in 1885 with his son Clovis, leaving Mette and the other children in Denmark, and the marriage never truly recovered ^[1]. From this point his life was one of chronic poverty, odd jobs, and single-minded devotion to painting.

Gauguin first went to Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1886, drawn by cheap lodging and by a region whose granite churches, religious pardons, and traditional dress seemed untouched by modern Paris ^[2]. He returned repeatedly over the next years, gathering younger painters around him. In 1887 he traveled with the painter Charles Laval to Panama and then Martinique, where tropical light and color pushed his palette toward stronger, flatter areas of pigment ^[3].

The decisive break came in 1888. Working at Pont-Aven with the young Émile Bernard, Gauguin painted Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), setting Breton women in white bonnets against a field of pure vermilion ^[4]. The picture abandoned naturalistic color and perspective in favor of memory, imagination, and decorative design. Critics and later historians grouped this approach under the names Synthetism and Cloisonnism, and it made Gauguin a central figure of the emerging Symbolist movement ^[2].

Late in 1888 Gauguin joined Vincent van Gogh in Arles at the invitation of Vincent's brother Theo, an art dealer who was buying Gauguin's work. The two months the painters spent together in the Yellow House were productive and increasingly tense, ending abruptly in December when van Gogh, in a breakdown, mutilated his own ear and Gauguin left for Paris ^[5]. The episode is among the most examined in modern art history, and the accounts of the two men do not fully agree.

Convinced that European civilization was exhausted, Gauguin auctioned his paintings in 1891 to raise funds and sailed for Tahiti, then a French colony. He hoped to find an unspoiled society; instead he found an island already reshaped by missionaries and colonial administration ^[1]. Out of this disappointment he constructed his own imagined Polynesia, painting Tahitian women, landscapes, and religious scenes in saturated color with a deliberately simplified line.

The first Tahitian period, from 1891 to 1893, produced works such as Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Manao tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) ^[4]. He also began Noa Noa, a written account of his island life, partly factual and partly invented, intended to explain his pictures to a French audience ^[3]. A return to Paris in 1893 brought a one-man show at the dealer Durand-Ruel that impressed younger artists but sold poorly.

Gauguin went back to Tahiti in 1895 and never saw France again. Ill, in debt, and grieving after news of the death of his daughter Aline in 1897, he painted his largest and most ambitious canvas, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a frieze of figures moving from infancy to old age, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ^[4]. He later wrote that he had intended it as a final statement before a suicide attempt that failed. Among Paul Gauguin achievements, this painting is usually ranked first, a summation of his ideas about life, faith, and doubt ^[2].

Gauguin's personal conduct has become inseparable from any honest Paul Gauguin biography. He effectively abandoned Mette and their five children, sending money rarely and letters full of self-justification ^[1]. In Tahiti and later the Marquesas he took very young Polynesian companions, including Teha'amana, who was around thirteen or fourteen by his own account in Noa Noa, and these relationships are now widely discussed as exploitative and colonial ^[6].

He was combative by temperament. In the islands he quarreled with the Catholic mission, the gendarmerie, and the colonial administration, sometimes defending Indigenous islanders against official abuses and sometimes acting purely from personal grievance ^[1]. He edited and wrote satirical journalism attacking local authorities, activity that eventually brought a conviction for libel.

Museums have responded to this record rather than hiding it. Recent exhibitions, including the National Gallery and Royal Academy showings of the Gauguin portraits project in 2019, have paired his paintings with frank discussion of his behavior, and critics continue to argue over how the art and the life should be weighed together ^[6].

In 1901 Gauguin left Tahiti for Atuona on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, seeking cheaper living and fresh subjects. He built a two-story house he named the Maison du Jouir, the House of Pleasure, decorated with carved and painted panels ^[3]. Despite failing health, including the effects of syphilis, heart trouble, and a badly injured leg, he continued to paint, carve, and write, producing late canvases of Marquesan riders and landscapes.

His disputes with authority followed him. Early in 1903 he was fined and sentenced to three months in prison for libel against a colonial official, a sentence he was appealing when he died ^[1]. Gauguin died at Atuona on May 9, 1903, at the age of fifty-four, and was buried in the Calvary Cemetery above the town, where his grave remains a site of pilgrimage ^[2].

Recognition arrived almost immediately after his death. The dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had been buying his work under contract, held a memorial exhibition in Paris in 1903, and the Salon d'Automne of 1906 mounted a large Gauguin retrospective that stunned young painters, among them Pablo Picasso ^[3].

Gauguin's influence runs through nearly every current of early twentieth century art. His flat planes of arbitrary color prepared the way for the Fauves around Matisse, his carved sculptures and interest in non-European forms fed the primitivism of Picasso and the Cubists, and the Nabis group, led by painters who had met him at Pont-Aven, treated his advice as doctrine ^[3]. Historians conventionally place him with Cézanne and van Gogh among the Post-Impressionists who redirected Western painting ^[2].

The market has followed the reputation. His 1892 canvas Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) was reported sold privately in 2015 for a sum near 300 million dollars, one of the highest prices ever recorded for a painting, though the exact figure was later disputed in court filings ^[7]. Major collections of his work are held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Courtauld Gallery in London ^[4].

Among basic Paul Gauguin facts, perhaps the most durable is this: a self-taught painter who began as a Sunday amateur ended by changing what painting was allowed to be. Debate over his treatment of the people he painted, and of his own family, has grown sharper in recent decades, yet the pictures continue to be studied, exhibited, and argued about, which is the fate he predicted for himself in his letters ^[1].