French artist, painter, sculptor and ceramist. Considered one of the best Post-Impressionist painters to come out of France, Gauguin was best known for his brilliantly colored works depicting primitive life in Polynesia. The son of a journalist and a French-Peruvian mother, Gauguin spent his early years in Lima, Peru, where his parents fled to escape the rigors of the coup d’etat in France that had been imposed by Napoleon III. His father died in Lima; three years later Gauguin returned to France with his mother.
At age 17 he traveled the world as a merchant seaman and returned to Paris at age 23 to parlay his business skills into earning a living as a stockbroker. This venture proved successful and two years later he married Danish governess Mette Gad. Settling into a comfortable bourgeois life, the couple had five children in rapid succession. Gauguin befriended Camille Pisarro, who introduced him to impressionistic art. Intrigued, Gauguin took up painting in his spare time and weekends, developing his talent to the point that he exhibited intermittently with the impressionists over the next six years.
Painting became an obsession and when the Paris exchange crashed in 1883, the stockbroker’s fate was decided for him. Returning home from work one day, a triumphant Gauguin announced to his wife, “I have handed in my resignation. From now on I shall paint every day.” The lack of steady income and the resultant strain on the marriage led to divorce two years later.
Over the next six years Gauguin lived in Brittany where he was the center of a small group of experimental painters known as the school of Pont-Aven which was under the direction of the impressionist painter Emile Bernard. A year in Martinique gave him a taste for the exotic.
Captivated by the idea of moving to the South Pacific, Gauguin felt the lush primitive environment would open more channels of creativity that would foster his ultimate artistic freedom. Booking passage to Tahiti in 1891, he tied up loose ends in Paris with his art dealer and his ex-wife. “I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”
Upon his arrival in Tahiti, he went native almost immediately, taking particular joy in the custom of having a different woman visit his hut every night. Finally he settled on a 13-year old bride named Tehur who frequently served as his model, most notably in his classic “The Spirit of the Dead is Watching.” His memoir “Noa Noa” is a romanticized account of life in Polynesia.
Gauguin returned to France two years later to sell his work, but his exhibition was not well received. Another trip to Brittany resulted in such artistic and personal upheaval that he sailed back to Tahiti embittered and disillusioned in 1895. When Gauguin returned to the island, his life was less than idyllic. A letter from Metta in 1898 told him that his favorite daughter had died of pneumonia at the age of 19. The impact of this news led to his first suicide attempt of swallowing arsenic. He was at that time ravaged by the syphilis that he had contacted in his younger years. He had thought that the sores on his legs were infected mosquito bites and paid no attention to medical authorities on the matter. Instead, he developed an addiction to absinthe, a hallucinogenic liquor, and to drugs.
In 1901 a painfully ill Gauguin moved to the village of Atuona in the Marquesan Islands. On 5/8/1903, a local carpenter found him lying motionless in his home. A bottle of laudanum was found on the bedside table. Although he managed to revive briefly, Gauguin died later that day.
He was buried the following morning at a Catholic service in the village cemetery. The local bishop wrote to his superiors, “The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed painter but an enemy of God and everything that is decent.”
Link to Wikipedia biography