Paul Gauguin was born on 7 June 1848 in Paris and died on 8 May 1903 at Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa, in one of the most remote corners of French Polynesia. Between those two dates he changed his trade, his continent and his painterly language. This article follows both: a life that was far more gradual than the legend suggests, and a technique that gave European painting back the flat plane.
The stockbroker who did not leave overnight
In 1871, through the family friend Gustave Arosa, Gauguin took a position at the Paris Bourse. He did well: by 1879 he was earning around 30,000 francs a year. In 1873 he married the Dane Mette-Sophie Gad, with whom he had five children over the following decade. When the Paris stock market crashed in 1882 he turned to painting full time; the next year, at thirty-five, he was a professional painter.
The legend says he walked out overnight. The record does not support it. Gauguin was painting and collecting art through the 1870s and exhibited with the Impressionists before he left the Bourse — from 1879 onward and right through to the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. (Sources differ on exactly how many of those shows he took part in; they agree that there were several and that he stayed to the last one.) The transition was long; the crash accelerated it, it did not cause it.
In between lies a stretch that biographies like to skip. In 1884 the family moved to Copenhagen, where Gauguin tried business without success; in 1885 he returned to Paris to paint, and the family stayed in Denmark. The decision from which everything else followed was therefore not a gesture but a parting that took years.
Pont-Aven: synthesis instead of observation
In the summer of 1886 Gauguin worked for the first time at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The place was not an accident: a painters’ colony had existed there since the 1850s, drawing artists with cheap living and distance from the academic centres. Gauguin returned to it until 1894 and became its central figure.
It was there that Synthetism took shape — in Tate’s definition, a “term associated with the style of symbolic representation adopted by Paul Gauguin and his followers in the 1880s characterised by flat areas of colour and bold outlines”. A Synthetist painting does not report what the eye sees; it fuses the subject, the felt mood, and the independent logic of line and colour. In practice that means abandoning faithful representation, painting from memory, pure colour, no perspective and no shading, and a geometrically ordered composition free of unnecessary detail.
Alongside Gauguin, the circle included Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Meijer de Haan, Charles Filiger, Armand Séguin, Władysław Ślewiński and Roderic O’Conor. It was not a school with a doctrine but a colony in which painters passed solutions to one another quickly.
The practical consequence is visible at once. Shadow stops modelling the body, colour detaches from natural appearance, and the scene organises itself by planes rather than by depth. Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven and Breton Boy belong to this Breton group; The Yellow Christ and The Green Christ show how far Gauguin carried that flatness into a religious subject.
Cloisonnism: colour bordered like enamel
Parallel to Synthetism, the same circle developed Cloisonnism. The name comes from the cloisonné enamelling technique, in which metal strips separate the fields of colour. On canvas it means a dark outline around a plane of uniform colour. The outline is not ornament but structure: it carries the form that shading would otherwise have to carry.
Who invented this approach is an open question, and we are not going to close it here. Émile Bernard claimed priority for Synthetism, which is regarded as disputed; other sources give the credit for Cloisonnism to his friend Louis Anquetin. Bernard’s greatest regret was precisely that Gauguin never named him as an influence. The relationship between the three names is therefore a matter of argument, not a settled fact.
In 1889, alongside the Paris World’s Fair, Gauguin organised a group showing of this circle at the Café Volpini under the title Paintings by the Impressionist and Synthetist Group. It ran in June and early July, presented more than a hundred works by eight artists — among them Anquetin, Bernard and Laval — and the press ignored it. As an event it was a failure; as a statement it was the first public appearance of Synthetism under its own name.
Arles: nine weeks with Vincent van Gogh
On 23 October 1888 Gauguin arrived at Arles, where Vincent van Gogh intended to found a “Studio of the South” in the Yellow House — a colony of painters who would work together, share costs and learn from one another. Gauguin was the first and, as it turned out, the only one to join. They worked together for about nine weeks, a little over sixty days.
They were a badly matched pair. Van Gogh painted in front of the motif and fast; Gauguin insisted that one should paint from memory, because memory selects what matters and discards the accidental. That difference is the core of those weeks, and the reason the same Arles motif looks like a different world in each man’s hands.
The arrangement ended in crisis: on 23 December 1888 Van Gogh cut off his own ear, and Gauguin left Arles. Sources diverge on exactly how that evening unfolded, and we do not adjudicate it here. What is not in dispute is the painterly consequence: from Arles Gauguin took away the confirmation that colour needs no natural excuse.
Tahiti
On 1 April 1891 Gauguin sailed for Tahiti; he returned to France in August 1893, and in June 1895 he left for the islands a second time. He spent the first months in Papeete, the capital, which disappointed him because it was already thoroughly European. He withdrew instead to Mataiea, a village some forty-five kilometres further along the coast, and set up his studio there.
The paintings made there are what he is best known for today: Arearea, Ia Orana Maria, Manao tupapau, Parahi te marae and Nevermore.
They are worth looking at without the postcard assumption. The colour is not a description of the tropics; it continues what began in Brittany — the plane, the outline, a subject that carries the meaning instead of the light. Tahiti did not change his method; it gave that method material old Europe did not have. His most ambitious canvas of the period, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, is built as a question rather than a scene.
Noa Noa
Noa Noa, Gauguin’s travel account of the islands, comes from the first Tahitian period and was first published in 1901. The text grew alongside the paintings and partly explains them. It should be read with care: it is the author’s own narrative about himself, not a neutral document, and it shapes to a large degree the self-portrait Gauguin wanted to leave behind. Read as a report on Tahiti it is the wrong book; read as evidence of how Gauguin saw himself it is irreplaceable.
The Marquesas and the end
In 1901 Gauguin moved further still, to the Marquesas Islands, to Atuona on the south coast of Hiva Oa. There he built a house on stilts which he called the Maison du Jouir. The last two years were marked by illness, by conflict with the local administration and by growing isolation; he painted to the end. He died on 8 May 1903, aged fifty-four, and is buried in the cemetery there.
1906: the exhibition that moved the next generation
Gauguin did not live to see the standing he has now. Three years after his death the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1906 mounted a retrospective of 227 works — paintings, drawings, ceramics and wood sculptures. Among the visitors it impressed deeply were Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Exactly what each of them took from it is a matter of interpretation, and we claim no more here than can be supported; what is not in doubt is that this posthumous exhibition carried Gauguin’s plane and outline forward into the twentieth century.
Why Gauguin is demanding to reproduce
A Gauguin depends on how precisely the plane of colour and its outline are struck. Because there is no modelling to cover an error, every transition is a decision that has to be right first time. With an Impressionist a wrong tone is corrected by the tone beside it; with Gauguin a wrong plane stays a wrong plane.
A hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas solves that task the way the original solved it — with brush and colour, not with print. That is exactly why the difference between a hand-painted canvas and a print is more visible in Gauguin than in most other painters: a print can carry the colour, but it cannot carry the fact that the plane was laid down in one go. Every Gauguin in our range is gathered on the Paul Gauguin page.
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