Oil Painting

  Paul Gauguin
  1848 -1903
     Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist artist. He was best known as a painter and his bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art. Expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.
     Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 to father, journalist Clovis Gauguin and mother, half-Peruvian Aline Maria Chazal, the daughter of socialist leader Flora Tristan. In 1851 the family left Paris for Peru, motivated by the political climate of the period. His father Clovis died on the voyage, leaving three-year old Paul, his mother and his sister to fend for themselves. They lived for four years in Lima, Peru with Paul’s uncle and his family. The imagery of Peru would later influence Paul in his art.
     At the age of seven, Paul and his family returned to France, to Orleans, to his grandfather. At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot’s assistant in the merchant marine and joined the navy. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. In 1873, he married a Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad. Over the next ten years, they would have five children.
     Gauguin had been interested in art since his childhood. In his free time, he began painting. He formed a friendship with artist Camille Pissarro and various other artists. Gauguin showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. After moving to Copenhagen, Gauguin had been driven to paint full-time, he returned to Paris in 1885, leaving his family in Denmark. Without adequate subsistence, his wife and their five children returned to her family. Gauguin outlived two of his children.
     Taken with his strong drive, he painted under influence of Van Gogh and Pissaro. Disappointed with Impressionism, he felt that traditional European painting had become too imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigor. There was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan (Japonisme). He was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX.
     In 1891, Gauguin moved to Tahiti and later to Dominique, where he died in 1903. This is where the artist found his individual style large paintings with sharp contours in lively and strong colors. More and more Gauguin was inspired by the beauty and the magic of the South Pacific and the impressive characters among the natives. His paintings are expressively exotic and Gauguin can justifiably be called the precursor of Expressionism and Fauvism.
     The vogue for Gauguin’s work started soon after his death. Many of his later paintings were acquired by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, which is displayed in the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage.