Gauguin, (Eug�ne Henri) Paul 1848-1903
French Post-Impressionist painter

Gauguin was born in Paris, the son of a journalist and a half-Peruvian Creole mother. He went to sea at the age of 17, but settled down in Paris in 1871 and became a successful stockbroker with a fondness for painting and for collecting Impressionist paintings. By 1883 he had already exhibited his own work with the help of Camille Pissarro and determined to devote himself entirely to art. He left his Danish wife and five children, and went to Pont Aven, Brittany, where he became the leader of a group of painters and met the painter and theorist �mile Bernard.

He travelled to Martinique (1887-88), and gradually evolved his own style, synthesism, in accordance with his hatred of civilization and identification with the emotional directness of primitive peoples. He moved more permanently to Tahiti in 1891-1901, and from there to the Marquesas Islands. His output developed markedly from the earlier Brittany seascapes - the Still Life with Three Puppies (1888, Museum of Modern Art, New York), the stained-glass effects of The Vision after the Sermon (1888, National Gallery, Edinburgh) with its echoes of Romanesque, Japanese and Breton folk art, to the tapestry-like canvases, painted in purples, greens, dark-reds and browns, of native subjects on Tahiti and at Dominiha on the Marquesas Islands, such as No Te Aha De Riri, Why are you angry? (1896, Chicago), and Faa Iheihe, decorated with ornaments (1898, Tate, London), which echoes his great allegorical painting dashed off prior to an unsuccessful suicide attempt, D'o� venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? O� allons-nous? ('Whence do we come? What are we? Where are we going?' 1898, Boston).

Gauguin also excelled in wood carvings of pagan idols and wrote an autobiographical novel, Noa-Noa (1894-1900). He is remembered not only because of the tragic choices he made, and as the subject of many popular novels (particularly Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, 1919), but because he directed attention to primitive art as a valid field of aesthetic explorationand consequently influenced almost every school of 20th-century art.

Bibliography: B Thomson, Gauguin (1987).