Paul Gauguin
A Parisian stockbroker who abandoned finance to paint, fleeing to the South Seas in search of primal color and spiritual truth.
1848–1903 (age 55)·French artist·Birthday: June 7
Biography
Paul Gauguin's story is one of radical reinvention. He began his adult life as a successful stockbroker in Paris, a respectable bourgeois with a family and a hobby of collecting and painting. In his mid-thirties, he burned those bridges, leaving his job and later his family to pursue art full-time. Disillusioned with European society and Impressionism's nuances, he sought a more direct, emotionally charged form of expression. His journeys to Brittany, Martinique, and ultimately Tahiti were pilgrimages. There, he developed his Synthetist style—flattening perspective, using bold, unnatural colors, and drawing on indigenous symbolism to create works that were less about observation and more about the essence of feeling and myth. He died in the Marquesas Islands, embittered and in poverty, having forever altered the course of modern art.
#1 When Paul Was Born
The biggest hits of 1848
Paul's Life & Times
The world at every milestone
1848Born
1853Started school
1861Became a teenager
President: Abraham Lincoln
1864Could drive
President: Abraham Lincoln
1866Could vote
President: Andrew Johnson
1869Turned 21
President: Ulysses S. Grant
1878Turned 30
President: Rutherford B. Hayes
1888Turned 40
President: Grover Cleveland
1898Turned 50
Spanish-American War; US emerges as a world power
President: William McKinley
1903Died at 55
Wright brothers achieve first powered flight
President: Theodore Roosevelt
Key Achievements
- Pioneered the Synthetist style, using flat planes of color and strong outlines to express emotional and symbolic ideas.
- Created seminal works like 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' during his time in Tahiti.
- His rejection of naturalism and embrace of primitivism profoundly influenced early 20th-century avant-garde movements like Fauvism and Expressionism.
- Was a central figure in the Pont-Aven artist colony in Brittany, shaping the work of his peers.
Did You Know?
He was a close friend and artistic rival of Vincent van Gogh; their tumultuous two-month stay together in Arles ended with van Gogh's self-mutilation.
Before becoming a full-time painter, he worked as a stockbroker and a sailor.
He spent his final years in the Marquesas Islands, where he was buried in a Catholic cemetery.
His grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a prominent socialist writer and feminist.
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
