Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was one of the great figures of the Symbolist movement. Inspired by Pissarro, he abandoned a career in stockbroking and began painting in an Impressionist manner. However, during his time working alongside Émile Bernard in Pont-Aven, he developed a style known as Synthetism that signalled a dramatic move away from purely imitative art by its use of large areas of flat color. This was followed by his now famous and incident-filled stay with Vincent van Gogh at Arles. He was increasingly fascinated with African and Asiatic ‘primitive’ art that echoed his own search for non-representational, symbolic expression. His yearning for the exotic culminated with a move to Tahiti and his masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897). Suffering from syphilis, he died in 1901 on the Maquesas Islands. He influenced not only Fauvism, but the entire direction of 20th century painting.