Paul Gauguin

Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently. From 1891 he lived mostly in French Polynesia, first in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas, where he died. The Polynesian paintings are the ones people know and they require being read with their circumstances attached: he was a European man in a French colony, painting a culture he presented as untouched and which colonisation had already substantially dismantled, and several of his relationships with Tahitian girls were with minors. None of that is a reason to stop looking at the paintings. It is a reason to look at them accurately.