Paul Gauguin did not believe in conformity. He did not adhere to one set of religious beliefs and pioneered a new artistic style known today as symbolism. Throughout his life, Gauguin shirked tradition and instead blazed his own paths, making him a person that you cannot feel apathetic about. His colorful life demands a response – you must either love or hate Gauguin. Either way, you cannot simply glance at the man and his work and then walk away without a reaction.
Gauguin did not even become an artist in the traditional fashion. He was born in 1848 to Aline Chazal and Clovis Gauguin. After a childhood spent in Peru, Orléans, Paris, and aboard a cargo ship traveling between Le Havre and Rio de Janeiro, Gauguin finally settled down in 1871 when he received a position as a stockbroker. In 1873 he married Mette-Sophie Gad and the couple went on to have five children (Grove Art Online). But Gauguin had already begun cultivating a deep interest in art and painting and although his wife considered her husband a “Sunday painter” and his new interest just a hobby (Hanson 26), his interest was gradually pulling him away from the life he had as a family man and stockbroker.
Although he likely would have made the transition from banking to art without any outside help, this transition was sped-up by the banking crash of 1882, which resulted in unemployment for Gauguin and many others in the industry. It was at this time that Gauguin began shaping in his mind the idea of supporting himself and his family by the sale of his artwork. Unfortunately, the general public had different ideas, and Gauguin’s early attempts at being a professional artist were, for the most part, failures. His artistic career reaching a point of stagnation, Gauguin took the advice of an artist friend and headed to Pont-Aven to observe and paint the religious community of the Breton people. It was during his time in Pont-Aven that Gauguin moved away from the Impressionist art style that he had first been introduced to and matured as an artist, developing his Symbolist style of painting (Grove Art Online). 
According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, in 1888, Theo van Gogh sought Gauguin’s assistance with his brother Vincent whose mental health was steadily failing. Gauguin went to live with Vincent van Gogh in Arles and at first the duo lived under the same roof and discussed artistic theories. But after a placid beginning, the arrangement ended in tragedy, with van Gogh first threatening Gauguin with a razor and then cutting off his own ear. Gauguin returned to Paris shortly after this incident (Grove Art Online).
Between 1889 and 1891 Gauguin made frequent trips to Pont-Aven and the primitive community that had first stimulated his artistic individuality. By this time, he was living the life of a forty-year-old bachelor and had not seen his family in five years (Hanson 153). His wife made several valiant attempts to convince her wayward husband to abandon his pursuit of artistic fame and return to his family, but by this time Gauguin had begun to consider himself a slave to his art, and his previous life and family merely sacrifices in his quest for artistic martyrdom.
In 1891, Gauguin traveled to the South Pacific for the first time. Although the idea of leaving Europe for Tahiti had first formed in Gauguin’s mind some years earlier, he did not set sail until April of 1891 after raising enough money for the trip from a successful auction of his art. By the time he left, he had achieved some degree of fame and his art was more appreciated by the European community than ever before. According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Gauguin could have hoped for a triumphant return to France after a temporary stay in Tahiti (Grove Art Online).
But something about Tahiti changed Gauguin. According to Bengt Danielsson in Gauguin in the South Seas, the name of Paul Gauguin “always recalls Tahiti rather than Paris, Brittany, Martinique, Arles, or any of the other places where he also lived and worked” (Danielsson 19). Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson state in The Noble Savage that, upon arriving in Papeete (the capital of Tahiti) in June of 1891, Gauguin was received warmly, given a name by the people, and a girl “attached herself to him” (Hanson 201).
But he was not happy in Papeete for long, finding it to have been too thoroughly colonized by the French. Just a month after arriving in Tahiti, Gauguin wrote to his wife of the death of the Tahitian king, saying “I heard of the death of King Pomare with keen regret. The Tahitian soil is becoming quite French, and the old order is gradually disappearing” (Gauguin Letters 163). Gauguin decided that to discover the Tahiti he sought, he needed to head to the Tahitian countryside. After a bout of illness, Gauguin found life in the countryside to be a pleasant existence, with friendly neighbors and a beautiful landscape. For the early part of his first stay in Tahiti Gauguin was largely just an observer of life around him, but in 1892 he took a young Tahtian girl – named Tehura – as a wife and it was her presence in his life that caused him to start painting again (Hanson 206-208). His artwork became an assimilation of his own style and primitive influences as he experimented with woodcutting and he began to use native subject matter and bright colors unbelievable to European observers. He was happy during this time of his life, but his habit of running through money and his health problems caused him to leave Tahiti in 1893 and return to France in an attempt to sell his artwork to raise funds for a return to Tahiti.
But upon his return to France, Gauguin did not find the fame and fortune that he had hoped for. He was seen as “theatrical” by most of civilized Europe according to the Grove Dictionary of Art and his art was therefore dismissed by the people he hoped to sell it to (Grove Art Online). His final auction, held in 1895, sold only nine of its forty-seven paintings. With this last insult, Gauguin left Europe for good, returning to the primitive Tahiti that had captured him and made him such a pariah in Europe. This was not just a departure from Europe, but a permanent farewell to the European lifestyle. Upon arriving once again in Papeete, Gauguin quickly found himself once again in dire straits – low on money and in poor health. Indeed, this was how he spent much of these last years of his life. It was, however, during this time that Gauguin produced many of his most famous works of art, including Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897). In 1897, after painting Where Do We Come From?, a dejected Gauguin attempted suicide through arsenic poisoning, but the copious amount of arsenic that he ingested made even his suicide a failure. After his failed suicide attempt, Gauguin took an office job in Papeete and gave up painting for some time. He left Tahiti in late 1901 for the wilder island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas (Grove Art Online). He spent the remainder of his life on this remote island, resigned to the fact that he would never be a famous artist that changed the world with his art. He died in 1903. It was only in death that he was vindicated, and today he is remembered as a father of the artistic Symbolist movement.
Paul Gauguin was a man of many contradictions. He began his adult life as a prosperous stockbroker and died as a penniless artist. He was a man who deeply loved his children, yet abandoned them for years. He praised the primitive beauty of Tahiti but longed for France and a more familiar life prior to his return to Europe in 1893. He was a man who first longed for fame and fortune, then resigned himself to relative anonymity but was more famous posthumously than even he likely would have dreamt of. Gauguin the writer condemned the missionary presence in Tahiti while Gauguin the artist praised the harmony of Christianity in the native Tahitian landscape. It is natural to either love Gauguin or hate him, but most find this man of mysterious contradictions very difficult to dismiss.
Paintings (from top to bottom):
Self Portrait: Les Miserables (1888), Oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum; Self-portrait with Halo (1889), Oil on wood, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Self Portrait (1893-4), Oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay