PAUL GAUGUIN

Early Years

Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent part of his early childhood in Lima, Peru, where his family fled amid political unrest. This early exposure to non-European cultures left a lasting mark on his imagination. Returning to France, Gauguin initially pursued a career in the merchant navy, and later as a stockbroker, while painting in his spare time.

By the late 1870s, he was exhibiting alongside the Impressionists, including Camille Pissarro, with whom he formed a close friendship. However, dissatisfied with Impressionism’s focus on naturalistic light and modern life, Gauguin began to seek deeper, symbolic meaning in art. By the mid-1880s, he abandoned his financial career entirely to dedicate himself to painting.

Artworks

Paul Gauguin’s artworks are known for their vivid colour palettes, simplified forms, and spiritual symbolism. His search for an authentic and unspoiled environment led him to Brittany, Martinique, and ultimately Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he developed his mature style. His works challenge colonial narratives and Western ideals of beauty and civilisation.

Early Experiments: Breaking from Impressionism

In the early 1880s, Gauguin rejected the impressionist palette and brushwork in favour of bolder colour and stylised forms. Works such as Vision after the Sermon (1888), painted during a stay in Pont-Aven, mark this departure. The painting uses flat areas of red and green to frame a biblical scene seen through the mind’s eye—a clear move toward Symbolism.

Arles and the Studio of the South

In October 1888, Gauguin travelled to Arles in southern France at the invitation of Vincent van Gogh, who dreamt of creating a collaborative artist community—the so-called ‘Studio of the South’. For nearly two months, the two artists lived and worked side by side in Van Gogh’s ‘Yellow House’, exchanging ideas, challenging each other’s methods, and painting the Provençal landscape with renewed intensity. Although short-lived, the Arles period was one of great artistic productivity and mutual influence. Gauguin’s The Painter of Sunflowers (1888) is both a portrait of Van Gogh and a commentary on his singular obsession with colour and light.

Tahiti: Myth, Colour, and the Idealised Other

In 1891, Gauguin left France for Tahiti in search of what he called a ‘pure’ and ‘primitive’ culture. The resulting paintings, including Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98) and Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), reflect his complex engagement with Polynesian belief systems, colonialism, and myth. Using bold outlines, flattened perspective, and lush colours, he created dreamlike scenes that blend reality with imagination.

While these works are among his most celebrated, Gauguin’s time in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands has become a subject of significant ethical and scholarly critique. He engaged in sexual relationships with underage Tahitian girls, and often portrayed Polynesian subjects through a colonial gaze that romanticised and objectified the people and culture.

In recent decades, museums and scholars have re-examined Gauguin’s legacy in light of these troubling aspects of his life. While his formal innovations remain influential, his personal conduct and the colonial context of his work continue to prompt critical reassessment.

Exhibitions

Paul Gauguin has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions.

Solo Exhibitions

• Gauguin: Portraits, National Gallery, London, 2019
• Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, Art Institute of Chicago, 2017
• Gauguin: Maker of Myth, Tate Modern, London, 2010
• Gauguin, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001–2002
• Gauguin in Tahiti: Paradise Lost, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2003
• Gauguin, Grand Palais, Paris, 1989

Group Exhibitions

• Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2020
• Post-Impressionism: The Birth of Modern Art, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2012
• Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012
• The Primitivists: Gauguin to Picasso, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 2007
• Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001–2002

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