Paul Gauguin Biography

(born June 7, 1848, Paris, France—died May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia) French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh, as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.

Beginnings

Gauguin was the son of a journalist from Orléans and a mother of Peruvian descent. After Napoleon III's coup d'état, Gauguin and his family moved in 1851 to Lima, Peru; four years later, after the death of his father, the family returned to France. At age 17 Gauguin enlisted in the merchant marine, and for six years he sailed around the world. His mother died in 1867, leaving legal guardianship of the family with the businessman Gustave Arosa, who, upon Gauguin's release from the merchant marine, secured a position for him as a stockbroker and introduced him to the Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad, whom Gauguin married in 1873. Gauguin's artistic leanings were first aroused by Arosa, who had a collection that included the work of Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-François Millet, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom he started painting. Gauguin soon began to receive artistic instruction and to frequent a studio where he could draw from a model. In 1876 his Landscape at Viroflay was accepted for the official annual exhibition in France, the Salon. He developed a taste for the contemporary avant-garde movement of Impressionism, and between 1876 and 1881 he assembled a personal collection of paintings by such figures as Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.

Gauguin met Pissarro in about 1875 and began to study under the supportive older artist, at first struggling to master the techniques of painting and drawing. In 1880 he was included in the fifth Impressionist exhibition, an invitation that was repeated in 1881 and 1882. He spent holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and began to make visible progress. During this period he also entered a social circle of avant-garde artists that included Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.