Paul Gauguin
Quotes & Wisdom
Paul Gauguin: The Stockbroker Who Fled to Paradise
In 1882, Paul Gauguin was a prosperous Parisian stockbroker with a Danish wife, five children, and a growing art collection. A decade later, he was living in a thatched hut in Tahiti, painting visions of an earthly paradise in colors no European had dared to use. Born in 1848 in Paris, Gauguin abandoned the comforts of bourgeois life for a radical artistic quest that took him from Brittany to Martinique to the South Pacific. He sought what he called the "primitive" - not as an anthropological curiosity but as a path back to authentic feeling, uncorrupted by civilization. His bold colors, flattened forms, and symbolic imagery helped launch Symbolism and profoundly influenced Pablo Picasso and the entire trajectory of modern art. He paid for his vision with poverty, disease, and isolation - dying alone in the Marquesas Islands at fifty-four.
Context & Background
Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848, in Paris, during one of the most turbulent years in French history - the Revolution of 1848 that overthrew King Louis-Philippe and established the Second Republic. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a liberal journalist; his mother, Aline Marie Chazal, was the daughter of the socialist activist Flora Tristan and descended from a prominent family in Peru. This mixed heritage - French intellectual radicalism and South American exoticism - would prove prophetic.
When Louis-Napoleon seized power in 1851, Clovis, a Republican, decided to flee France for Peru. He died of a heart attack during the voyage. Aline continued to Lima with her two young children, and Paul spent the next six years in the household of his great-uncle, a wealthy and influential figure in Peruvian society. The lush colors, strange vegetation, and Pre-Columbian art of Peru imprinted themselves on the young boy's imagination. When the family returned to France in 1855, the gray cities of the north must have seemed unbearably dull.
At seventeen, Gauguin joined the French merchant navy and spent six years sailing the world - South America, the Mediterranean, the Arctic. By 1871, he was back in Paris, working as a stockbroker at the firm of Paul Bertin. He was good at it. He married Mette-Sophie Gad, a Danish woman from Copenhagen, and they began raising a family in comfortable bourgeois prosperity. He started collecting Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and others. And he started painting on Sundays.
Gauguin's transformation from amateur to obsessive artist happened gradually, then all at once. Pissarro befriended him and introduced him to the Impressionist circle. By 1880, Gauguin was exhibiting alongside the masters. But his ambitions were growing faster than his skill, and his domestic responsibilities were becoming constraints he could not bear.
The financial crash of 1882 devastated the French stock market and with it Gauguin's brokerage career. Rather than rebuilding, he seized the crisis as permission to pursue art full-time. The decision was catastrophic for his family. Mette, now the sole breadwinner, moved back to Copenhagen with the children. Gauguin followed briefly, attempted to sell tarpaulins, failed miserably, and returned to Paris in 1885. The marriage was effectively over. He would see his children only a handful of times in the remaining eighteen years of his life.
The abandonment of his family is the uncomfortable truth at the center of Gauguin's story. He was not forced out by circumstance; he chose art over fatherhood, vision over responsibility. Whether this was courageous self-realization or monstrous selfishness depends on where you stand, and Gauguin himself was not interested in the distinction.
Broke and restless, Gauguin sought environments that were cheaper and more "primitive" than Paris. In 1886, he traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany, where a community of artists had gathered, attracted by the region's Celtic culture, traditional costumes, and low cost of living. Here Gauguin began developing the bold, anti-naturalistic style that would define his mature work - strong outlines, flat areas of saturated color, and subjects drawn from religious and mythological traditions.
His painting The Vision After the Sermon (1888), depicting Breton women witnessing Jacob wrestling the angel, was a breakthrough. The ground is painted a shocking vermillion red, the figures are outlined in heavy dark contours borrowed from Japanese woodcuts and medieval stained glass, and the entire composition rejects the Impressionist devotion to observed reality in favor of subjective, spiritual experience.
In 1887, Gauguin sailed to Martinique with the painter Charles Laval, seeking a tropical paradise. He found brilliant colors and exotic landscapes but also illness, heat, and crushing poverty. The Martinique paintings, however, showed a new richness and freedom that pointed toward his Pacific work.
The most famous episode of this period was his disastrous two-month cohabitation with Vincent van Gogh in Arles in late 1888. Van Gogh, desperately lonely and emotionally unstable, had invited Gauguin to join him in creating an artists' colony in the south of France. The visit ended with Van Gogh's mental breakdown and the severing of his own ear. Gauguin fled back to Paris. The two never met again.
In 1891, Gauguin sold thirty paintings, raised funds at an auction, and set sail for Tahiti, declaring his intention to escape "everything that is artificial and conventional" in European civilization. His image of Tahiti was drawn largely from Pierre Loti's romantic novel Le Mariage de Loti - a fantasy of unspoiled paradise populated by beautiful, willing women living in harmony with nature.
The reality was different. French colonial administration had already transformed much of Tahitian society. Christian missionaries had suppressed traditional religion and culture. The "primitive" paradise Gauguin sought was largely a European projection. But this did not stop him from painting it into existence. Working from a mixture of observation, imagination, and borrowed Polynesian iconography, he created a body of work of extraordinary power and originality.
His Tahitian paintings - Fatata te Miti (Near the Sea), Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), Te Tamari No Atua (The Birth of Christ) - use flattened forms, bold outlines, and colors of almost hallucinatory intensity. They depict an idealized world of sensuality, spiritual mystery, and harmony with nature that existed more in Gauguin's imagination than in Tahitian reality. But their artistic power is undeniable.
His masterwork, painted in 1897 during a period of despair and illness, was the enormous canvas Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? - a panoramic meditation on birth, life, and death rendered in a dreamlike palette of blues, greens, and golds. Gauguin considered it his testament.
Gauguin was not only a painter. He was an accomplished sculptor and ceramicist whose woodcarvings and pottery anticipate the abstraction of twentieth-century art. His carved wooden reliefs, influenced by Polynesian tiki figures, Egyptian art, and Buddhist sculpture, were radically innovative and deeply strange for their time.
He was also a writer. His Tahitian journal, Noa Noa, combines autobiography, ethnography, and fantasy in a prose style that is as vivid and unreliable as his paintings. The Writings of a Savage, a posthumous collection of his letters and notes, reveals a man of fierce intelligence, monumental ego, and genuine philosophical depth.
Gauguin's personal life in the Pacific is difficult to separate from the colonial power dynamics of the era. His relationships with young Tahitian and Marquesan women - he took a series of teenage partners, or "vahines" - are viewed today through a lens that recognizes the vast inequalities of power involved. His legacy is inseparable from these complications.
He spent his final years on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, where he clashed with colonial authorities and Catholic missionaries while continuing to paint, carve, and write. He died on May 8, 1903, alone and in poor health. His posthumous influence was immense. Retrospective exhibitions in Paris in 1903 and 1906 electrified the avant-garde. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and the Fauvists drew directly from Gauguin's bold use of color. His insistence that art should express inner feeling rather than external reality helped launch the entire trajectory of modern art.