Paul Gauguin

Based on Wikipedia: Paul Gauguin

The Stockbroker Who Abandoned Everything

In 1885, a successful Parisian stockbroker walked out on his Danish wife, five children, and a career that had earned him the equivalent of nearly three hundred thousand dollars a year. He left behind respectability, financial security, and the entire comfortable bourgeois existence he had built over eleven years. He did this to paint.

His name was Paul Gauguin, and his story is not simply one of artistic dedication. It is a tale of a man who spent his entire life running—from civilization, from responsibility, from Europe itself—in pursuit of something he could never quite name. That pursuit would eventually lead him to the far side of the world, to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he would create some of the most influential paintings of the modern era while dying slowly of syphilis, poverty, and heartbreak.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Born Into Revolution

Gauguin entered the world on June 7, 1848, in Paris. The timing matters. That year, revolutions swept across Europe like wildfire—in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary. Monarchies trembled. The old order cracked. It was, in many ways, the violent birth of the modern world.

His family embodied this turbulence. His father, Clovis, was a liberal journalist, the kind of man who wrote things that made governments nervous. His mother, Aline, came from even more radical stock. Her mother—Paul's grandmother—was Flora Tristan, a pioneering socialist and feminist who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the very revolutions erupting across Europe that year. Flora had died just four years before Paul's birth, worn out by activism and police surveillance. She had written a famous travelogue about Peru, where part of her family still lived in considerable wealth and influence.

The family connection to Peru would shape young Paul profoundly.

When Paul was just eighteen months old, his father decided France had become too dangerous for journalists with inconvenient opinions. The authorities had suppressed the newspaper Clovis wrote for, and the family set sail for Peru, hoping to start fresh under the protection of Aline's South American relatives.

Clovis never made it. He died of a heart attack during the voyage.

A Peruvian Childhood

Aline arrived in Lima a widow with two small children, but she arrived to open arms. Her father's family was wealthy and politically connected—one relative was about to become president of Peru. For the next four years, young Paul lived what he would later describe as an idyllic existence, surrounded by servants and nursemaids, wrapped in the warmth and color of South America.

He never forgot it. Those early years imprinted on him a vision of paradise, of a life lived outside the gray constraints of European civilization. When, decades later, he would sail to Tahiti in search of an unspoiled world, he was in some sense trying to return to Peru, trying to recapture a childhood that ended far too abruptly.

In 1854, when Paul was six, political upheaval swept through Peru. The family's powerful protectors fell from grace. Aline had no choice but to return to France with her children, leaving them with Paul's paternal grandfather in Orléans while she went to Paris to work as a dressmaker. The Peruvian relatives, now out of power themselves, cut off the generous support they had been providing.

Just like that, paradise was over.

From Sailor to Stockbroker

The next phase of Gauguin's life followed a conventional enough trajectory for a young man of his class and circumstances. He attended Catholic boarding school. He entered a naval preparatory school in Paris. At seventeen, he signed on with the merchant marine as a pilot's assistant, and three years later joined the French navy proper.

It was during his naval service that he learned his mother had died. The letter from his sister Marie took months to reach him in India. By the time he read it, Aline had been in her grave for some time.

When Gauguin finally returned to Paris in 1871, at the age of twenty-three, a family friend helped him secure a position as a stockbroker. And here is where the story takes its first surprising turn: he was remarkably good at it.

Within a few years, Gauguin was earning thirty thousand francs annually from his brokerage work—roughly equivalent to a hundred and forty-five thousand dollars today. He made nearly as much again from shrewd dealings in the art market. He married a Danish woman named Mette-Sophie Gad. They had five children in ten years: Émile, Aline, Clovis, Jean René, and Paul Rollon. He was, by all outward appearances, a successful bourgeois gentleman with a promising future.

But Gauguin had a hobby.

The Sunday Painter

Around 1873, the same year he became a stockbroker, Gauguin began painting in his spare time. He haunted the galleries and cafés of the 9th arrondissement, where the Impressionists gathered. He bought paintings by emerging artists. Most importantly, he befriended Camille Pissarro, one of the leading figures of the Impressionist movement.

Pissarro took the young amateur under his wing. On Sundays, Gauguin would visit Pissarro's home and paint in his garden. Through Pissarro, he met the other Impressionists. He began to exhibit with them. A sculpture he made of his son Émile appeared in the 1879 Impressionist Exhibition—the only sculpture in the entire show.

His paintings from this period were competent but unremarkable. Critics dismissed them. Yet some of these early works, like "The Market Gardens of Vaugirard," are now considered significant pieces.

What happened next was not simply artistic passion overcoming bourgeois caution. It was also economic catastrophe.

In 1882, the Paris stock market crashed.

The Crash That Changed Everything

The financial crisis of 1882 devastated the French economy. The art market contracted sharply. Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had been buying work from the Impressionists, stopped purchasing paintings. Gauguin's income from both his brokerage work and his art dealing collapsed.

Over the next two years, watching his conventional career crumble, Gauguin began to formulate a radical plan. If his bourgeois life was falling apart anyway, why not pursue painting full-time?

In October 1883, he wrote to Pissarro announcing his decision. He would make his living from painting "at all costs." He asked for help, which Pissarro initially provided.

The following year, Gauguin moved his family to Copenhagen, hoping to work as a salesman of tarpaulins—a venture that failed spectacularly. He could not speak Danish. The Danes did not want French tarpaulins. Mette was forced to become the primary breadwinner, teaching French to trainee diplomats.

The marriage deteriorated rapidly. In 1885, at Mette's urging and with the full support of her family, Gauguin returned to Paris alone. He took only his six-year-old son Clovis with him. The other four children remained in Denmark.

He would never really go back. His last physical contact with his family came in 1891. By 1894, Mette had broken with him completely.

Poverty and Reinvention

That first winter back in Paris was brutal. Gauguin was nearly destitute, forced to take menial jobs to survive. Clovis fell ill and had to be sent to a boarding school, paid for by Gauguin's sister Marie. The artist produced almost no work during this period of grinding poverty.

By 1886, things had stabilized enough for Gauguin to exhibit nineteen paintings at what would prove to be the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition. Most were older work from Rouen or Copenhagen. The reviews were not kind.

But something else happened at that exhibition that would prove far more significant. A painter named Georges Seurat emerged as the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde, promoting a technique called Pointillism—the painstaking application of tiny dots of pure color that blend optically when viewed from a distance.

Gauguin despised it.

He rejected Seurat's approach contemptuously and broke decisively with Pissarro, who had become interested in the new technique. From this point forward, Gauguin would chart his own course, developing a style that moved ever further from Impressionism toward something more symbolic, more primitive, more psychologically charged.

Brittany and the Birth of a New Style

In the summer of 1886, Gauguin traveled to Pont-Aven, a small village in Brittany that had become popular with artists precisely because it was cheap. He arrived as a failure. He left as a cult figure.

Something about the young art students who flocked to Pont-Aven responded to Gauguin. Perhaps it was his exotic background—the childhood in Peru, the years at sea. Perhaps it was his naturally combative personality. He was both an accomplished boxer and fencer, and his physical presence commanded attention. He dressed flamboyantly and cultivated an image of himself as an outsider, a man who had seen the world beyond stuffy European academies.

Among the artists he met there was Charles Laval, who would accompany him the following year on an adventure to Panama and Martinique.

Gauguin's work that summer began to evolve. He painted Breton peasants and landscapes, but with an increasingly bold use of pure color and simplified forms. The influence of Japanese prints began to show—that flat, decorative quality, those strong outlines. So too did something else: a deliberate embrace of what might be called "primitive" aesthetics, a rejection of the refined techniques taught in Parisian academies.

One painting from this period, "Four Breton Women," shows just how far he had traveled from Impressionism. The figures are almost caricatured, their features exaggerated, the colors applied in bold, unmodulated patches. There is nothing atmospheric or fleeting about it. This is a painting that makes a statement.

The Search for Somewhere Else

By the late 1880s, Gauguin had developed a coherent artistic philosophy, even if it was mostly defined by what he rejected. He was tired of Impressionism, which he now saw as merely imitative, lacking in symbolic depth. He was tired of European art altogether, which seemed to him exhausted and spiritually bankrupt.

What he wanted was something the art of Africa and Asia seemed to offer: mystic symbolism, spiritual vigor, a connection to primal human experience that European civilization had lost.

This was, of course, a fantasy—a European's romanticized projection onto cultures he barely understood. But it was a fantasy that would drive him to the other side of the world.

First, though, came the trip to Panama and Martinique with Charles Laval in 1887. The experience was transformative. In Martinique, Gauguin found lush tropical landscapes and a way of life that seemed to him uncorrupted by industrial modernity. His paintings from this period glow with vibrant color and depict what he saw as the natural, unspoiled existence of the island's inhabitants.

When he returned to Pont-Aven afterward, his style had crystallized into something the art world would come to call "Synthetism"—characterized by bold outlines, flat areas of color, and symbolic rather than realistic subject matter. Along with Émile Bernard and others, he helped establish what became known as the Pont-Aven School.

But Brittany was not far enough. Martinique had given him a taste of escape. Now he wanted more.

The Tahitian Dream

In 1891, Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, then a French colony in the South Pacific. He was forty-three years old, nearly penniless, and fleeing everything he had ever known.

He told himself he was searching for an unspoiled paradise, a place where he could live cheaply and paint freely, far from the corruptions of Western civilization. What he actually found was more complicated. Tahiti had been a French colony for decades. Missionaries had suppressed traditional religious practices. European diseases had decimated the indigenous population. The "primitive" world Gauguin sought existed more in his imagination than in reality.

Yet something remarkable happened anyway. Perhaps because he was projecting so fiercely, perhaps because the landscape and people genuinely inspired him, Gauguin produced an extraordinary body of work in Tahiti. His paintings from this period—vivid, mysterious, suffused with symbolic meaning—would prove enormously influential on the development of modern art.

The colors were unlike anything being painted in Europe: deep oranges and reds, lush greens, that particular Polynesian blue. The subjects were Tahitian women, often nude or partially clothed, posed in attitudes that suggested ancient ritual or spiritual contemplation. The titles frequently referenced Tahitian mythology, or what Gauguin understood of it.

These were paintings of a world that did not quite exist, a syncretic fantasy of the primitive and the symbolic. They were also, undeniably, masterpieces.

The Final Years

Gauguin spent most of his remaining years in French Polynesia, with one brief and disastrous return to France in 1893-94. His health deteriorated. He had contracted syphilis at some point, and the disease slowly ravaged his body. He was perpetually broke, dependent on occasional sales and small remittances from a dealer in Paris named Ambroise Vollard, who believed in his work even when few others did.

In 1901, he moved to the Marquesas Islands, even more remote than Tahiti, seeking an ever-purer version of his South Seas fantasy. He built a house he called the "House of Pleasure" and decorated it with carvings. He quarreled with the local Catholic bishop. He painted and sculpted and wrote.

He died there on May 8, 1903, at the age of fifty-four. He was alone, sick, and still largely unrecognized by the European art world he had fled.

After Death, Glory

The recognition Gauguin craved in life came almost immediately after his death. Ambroise Vollard organized exhibitions of his work. Critics and collectors who had ignored him suddenly recognized his genius. Two major posthumous exhibitions in Paris cemented his reputation.

His influence on the artists who came after him is almost impossible to overstate. Pablo Picasso studied his use of non-Western aesthetic traditions. Henri Matisse absorbed his bold, unmodulated colors. The Fauves, the Expressionists, even the early abstractionists—all owed debts to Gauguin's willingness to abandon naturalistic representation in favor of emotional and symbolic truth.

He is remembered too for his intense, troubled friendship with Vincent van Gogh. The two artists lived together briefly in Arles in 1888, a period that ended in van Gogh's famous breakdown and self-mutilation. Gauguin was connected through Vincent to the latter's brother Theo, an art dealer who supported both of them during difficult years.

The Complicated Legacy

How should we think about Gauguin today? The question has no easy answer.

On one hand, he was an artistic revolutionary who broke with convention at tremendous personal cost. He gave up wealth, family, and comfort to pursue a vision. The paintings he created in Tahiti and the Marquesas remain startlingly beautiful and emotionally powerful more than a century later.

On the other hand, his romanticization of "primitive" cultures was deeply problematic. He took young Tahitian girls as mistresses—some as young as thirteen. He spread syphilis among the local population. His vision of Polynesian paradise was a European fantasy that erased the reality of colonial oppression.

Perhaps the most honest thing to say is that Gauguin was a man who spent his whole life searching for something he could never quite find. Peru, Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti, the Marquesas—each was supposed to be the place where he would finally feel at home. None of them was.

The stockbroker who abandoned his family to paint; the European who fled to the South Seas seeking authenticity; the artist who created beauty while behaving badly—Gauguin contains multitudes, most of them contradictory.

What endures, beyond the complications of his biography, is the work itself: those luminous Tahitian canvases, those bold Breton experiments, those sculptures and woodcuts and ceramics. In them, we see a man wrestling with modernity, with colonialism, with his own restless demons—and somehow, through that struggle, creating art that still has the power to move us.

He was not a good man. He may not even have been, by the end, a happy one. But he was, undeniably, a great artist. And the tension between those truths is something each viewer must resolve for themselves, standing before his paintings, wondering what exactly it is they see.