Paul Gauguin Art Prints

He spent his early childhood in Peru, and the memory stayed with him. After years at sea with the merchant marine and the navy, he joined the Paris Bourse in 1871, earning well and buying work by emerging artists. Camille Pissarro became his mentor, and Gauguin painted in his garden on Sundays; when the market crashed in 1882 Gauguin chose painting full time.

In Brittany he broke with Impressionism. The Yellow Christ, painted at Pont-Aven in 1889, sets the crucifixion in the Breton countryside with local women praying at its foot. Look at how little shading there is: heavy lines hold the figures, and the yellow, red and green of the autumn fields pick up the yellow of Christ's body. In late 1888 he spent nine weeks painting with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, and his portrait of Vincent at work on the sunflowers dates from that stay. Edgar Degas, the contemporary he admired most, bought his work and never wavered in public support.

He sailed for Tahiti in 1891 to escape “everything that is artificial and conventional”, yet packed photographs and prints to work from, and found the capital, Papeete, already heavily European. In Ia Orana Maria (1891), he recast the Madonna and Child as a Tahitian mother and son, greeted by two women under an angel with yellow wings. Many of his Tahitian titles were garbled enough that Tahitian speakers struggled to read them.

His life there is now hard to separate from the pictures: he took a 13-year-old girl as a “wife”, and critics today debate his work as colonial fantasy. Ill and in debt, he finished Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? in 1897 and called it his final testament. He died on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1903.