Paul Gauguin

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on the 7th of June 1848, in the middle of a year when revolutions were sweeping across Europe. His father was a liberal journalist whose newspaper was shut down by French authorities, forcing the family to flee. His mother descended from Flora Tristan, an author and early socialist activist who helped lay foundations for the very uprisings of 1848 and died under police surveillance in 1844. Paul would carry copies of his grandmother's books with him until the end of his life.

  By the time Gauguin reached his twenties, he was not an artist at all. He was a successful stockbroker earning 30,000 francs a year at the Paris Bourse, painting only on weekends, visiting galleries, buying canvases by emerging artists. Then the Paris stock market crashed in 1882. Within two years, his earnings had collapsed, his marriage was fracturing, and he had decided, at all costs, to become a full-time painter.

  What unfolded over the next two decades took him from Brittany to the Panama Canal to Martinique, and finally to Tahiti and the remote Marquesas Islands, where he died on the morning of the 8th of May 1903 with an empty bottle of laudanum at his bedside. The questions his life raises are still unresolved: what drove a prosperous Parisian to dismantle everything he had built? What did he find in Polynesia, and what did he cost the people he found there? And how did paintings that earned mixed reviews in his lifetime come to shape modern art for generations?

• 2. The Stockbroker Who Painted

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  Gustave Arosa, a close family friend, got Gauguin his position at the Paris Bourse when Gauguin was 23. For the next eleven years he prospered, and by 1879 he was earning as much from his dealings in the art market as he was from brokerage. He lived on the 9th arrondissement of Paris, at 15, rue la Bruyère, near the cafes where the Impressionists gathered.

  Camille Pissarro was the crucial connection. Gauguin visited him on Sundays to paint in his garden, and Pissarro introduced him to other artists and techniques. When Gauguin showed sculptures and paintings in Impressionist exhibitions in 1879, 1881, and 1882, the paintings received dismissive reviews. A sculpture of his son Emile was the only sculpture in the fourth Impressionist Exhibition of 1879. Several of those dismissed paintings, including The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, are now highly regarded.

  In 1873, Gauguin had married a Danish woman named Mette-Sophie Gad. Over ten years they had five children. When the stock market crashed in 1882 and his income contracted sharply, he moved the family to Rouen, then to Copenhagen, where he tried without success to sell French tarpaulins to Danes he could not speak to. Mette became the chief breadwinner, teaching French to trainee diplomats. His middle-class life fell apart in stages. He returned to Paris in 1885 after Mette and her family asked him to leave. His last physical contact with all of them came in 1891.

• 3. Brittany and the New Style

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  The summer of 1886 brought Gauguin to Pont-Aven, an artists' colony in Brittany, primarily because it was cheap. He arrived expecting little and found himself unexpectedly celebrated by the young art students who flooded the seaside resort each summer. He was remembered as much for his outlandish appearance as for his painting.

  Gauguin contemptuously rejected Georges Seurat's Pointillist technique, which that same year's eighth and final Impressionist exhibition had established as the new avant-garde. He also broke decisively with Pissarro, who became antagonistic toward him from that point on. In their place, Gauguin found a different set of influences. The naive drawings of the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, used in a popular guidebook on Brittany, had caught the imagination of the student artists there, and Gauguin consciously imitated them in sketches of Breton girls that he later worked into paintings in his Paris studio.

  The most important of these was Four Breton Women, which shows a marked departure from his earlier Impressionist style. Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, his work evolved toward a style the critic Edouard Dujardin named Cloisonnism, after its resemblance to medieval cloisonne enamelwork: flat areas of color separated by bold outlines. The Yellow Christ, painted in 1889, is often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist work, its image reduced to zones of pure color divided by heavy black lines, dispensing with classical perspective and subtle gradation of tone. His painting later evolved further into Synthetism, in which form and color carry equal weight rather than either one dominating.

• 4. Panama, Martinique, and Van Gogh

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  In 1887, Gauguin left France with his friend Charles Laval, dreaming of purchasing land on the small Panamanian island of Taboga and living, as he put it, on fish and fruit, without anxiety for the day or the morrow. By the time he reached the port city of Colon, he was out of money. He found work as a laborer on the French construction of the Panama Canal, digging from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening under tropical sun and rain, as he wrote to his wife Mette. He was arrested at one point in Panama City for urinating in public and fined four francs. After falling deathly ill and passing through a yellow fever and malaria sanatorium on Taboga, he abandoned the dream.

  He and Laval moved to Martinique, spending June through November near Saint Pierre on the Caribbean island. While Gauguin suffered dysentery and marsh fever, he produced between ten and twenty paintings, most often estimated at twelve, and came into contact with a small community of Indian immigrants whose symbols would later appear in his work. He finished eleven known paintings during his stay, brightly colored figural scenes painted outdoors.

  Those Martinique paintings were shown at his color merchant Arsene Poitier's gallery, where Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo saw and admired them. Theo purchased three for 900 francs and had them hung at his firm, Goupil and Cie. In 1888, at Theo's instigation, Gauguin and Vincent spent nine weeks painting together at Vincent's Yellow House in Arles. Their relationship deteriorated. On the evening of the 23rd of December 1888, according to Gauguin's later account, Vincent confronted him with a straight razor. That same evening, Vincent cut off his own left ear, wrapped it in newspaper, and gave it to a woman at a nearby brothel with the instruction to keep this object carefully, in remembrance of me. Gauguin left Arles the following morning. They never met again, though they continued to correspond and Gauguin proposed forming a studio together in Antwerp as late as 1890.

• 5. Edgar Degas and the Art World

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  Among Gauguin's many contemporaries, Edgar Degas occupied a singular position. Gauguin had revered his figures and interiors from the beginning of his artistic life, and the friendship lasted until Gauguin's death, longer and more stable than almost any other relationship of his career.

  Degas was among Gauguin's earliest supporters, buying his work and persuading the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to do the same. When Gauguin's Durand-Ruel exhibition in November 1893 received mocking responses from Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and his old mentor Pissarro, Degas stood apart. He purchased and praised the exotic work on display. In appreciation, Gauguin gave him The Moon and the Earth, one of the paintings that had attracted the most hostile criticism. Degas later bought two more paintings at Gauguin's 1895 auction, including the version Gauguin painted of Edouard Manet's Olympia, specifically to help fund Gauguin's final trip to Tahiti.

  The dealer Ambroise Vollard would play an equally critical role in Gauguin's posthumous reputation. Vollard organized exhibitions late in Gauguin's career and was central to two major posthumous exhibitions in Paris. The arrangement Vollard eventually reached with Gauguin in 1900 provided a monthly advance of 300 francs against a guaranteed purchase of at least twenty-five unseen paintings a year at 200 francs each, plus art materials. It was the closest thing to financial stability Gauguin had known since his stockbroking days.

• 6. Tahiti and the Masterpiece

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  Gauguin sailed for Tahiti on the 1st of April 1891, promising to return a rich man. He spent his first three months in Papeete, the colonial capital, already saturated with French and European culture. His biographer Belinda Thomson observes he must have been disappointed. Unable to afford life in Papeete, he moved to a bamboo hut in Mataiea, 45 kilometers from the capital, and began painting Tahitian life in works such as Fatata te Miti and Ia Orana Maria.

  His travelogue, first published in 1901, revealed that he had taken a thirteen-year-old girl as his native wife, a girl called Teha'amana, who was pregnant by him by the end of summer 1892. Teha'amana was the subject of several paintings, including the celebrated Spirit of the Dead Watching and a notable woodcarving now in the Musee d'Orsay. Modern critics have suggested the travelogue was in part fantasized and plagiarized.

  His return visit to Tahiti beginning in September 1895 brought his most ambitious work. In April 1897, he learned that his favorite daughter Aline had died of pneumonia. In debt and in deteriorating health, he completed at the end of that year the monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which he regarded as his masterpiece and final artistic testament. In a letter to his champion Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, he wrote that he tried to kill himself after finishing it. Vollard exhibited the painting in November the following year alongside eight related canvases, and the show was a decided success. Where Do We Come From? received mixed reviews and Vollard had difficulty selling it; he eventually sold it in 1901 for 2,500 francs.

• 7. The Marquesas and Final Years

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  Gauguin had conceived the idea of the Marquesas Islands ever since seeing a collection of intricately carved Marquesan bowls and weapons in Papeete during his first months in Tahiti. He arrived in Atuona on the island of Hiva-Oa on the 16th of September 1901. He found a society whose population had collapsed from roughly 80,000 in the 18th century to just 4,000, decimated by Western diseases, especially tuberculosis.

  He bought a plot of land from the Catholic mission and built a two-floor house he called Maison du Jouir, or House of Pleasure. The door lintel and jambs, which survive in museums, were carved in polychrome wood. At the foot of his steps he erected sculptures lampooning the local bishop and a servant reputed to be the bishop's mistress. The sculpture known as Pere Paillard is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, while its companion piece Therese sold at a Christie's New York sale in 2015 for a record $30,965,000 for a Gauguin sculpture.

  His health continued to fail. By September 1902, the pain in his injured ankle was so extreme that he resorted to morphine injections before switching to laudanum out of fear of the habit he was forming. His friend and neighbor Monfreid wrote to him advising against returning to Europe: you are a unique and legendary artist, sending to us from the remote South Seas disconcerting and inimitable works which are the definitive creations of a great man who, in a way, has already gone from this world.

  In March 1903, a local magistrate fined him 500 francs and sentenced him to three months in prison for libeling a gendarme. Gauguin filed an appeal and began raising funds to travel to Papeete to contest it. He was found dead by his neighbor Tioka on the morning of the 8th of May 1903. Paul Vernier, his pastor and friend, believed he died of a heart attack. Gauguin was buried that afternoon in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in Atuona. His nearest neighbor in that cemetery is Bishop Martin, his grave marked by a large white cross.

• 8. Legacy and Influence

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  Word of Gauguin's death did not reach Monfreid in France until the 23rd of August 1903. His effects were auctioned in two separate sales, one in Atuona and one in Papeete on the 5th of September 1903, a dispersal his biographer Mathews notes led to the loss of much valuable information about his final years. The Thomson inventory of his estate revealed that his life in the Marquesas was not as impoverished or primitive as he had liked to maintain. Mette received the auction proceeds, about 4,000 francs. One painting sold that day in Papeete for 150 francs; it sold at Sotheby's in 2004 for US$39,208,000.

  Gauguin's posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1903 and 1906 had a powerful influence on the French avant-garde. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Andre Derain, and the movements of Fauvism, Cubism, and Orphism all trace part of their lineage to him. Art historian John Rewald, recognized as a foremost authority on late 19th-century art, devoted major works to examining Gauguin's place in the Post-Impressionist period.

  In 1973, a bronze cast of his Oviri figure was placed on his grave in Atuona, as he had wished. In 2014, forensic examination of four teeth found at the bottom of a well he built on Hiva-Oa found no traces of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, throwing into question the long-held belief that Gauguin had suffered from syphilis. The teeth were almost certainly his by DNA analysis, and the absence of those chemicals, described as the standard treatment for syphilis at the time, remains one of the unresolved questions surrounding the final years of a man who spent his life courting uncertainty.