Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin is one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but who eventually broke away to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. As the Impressionist movement was culminating in the late 1880s, Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western society. He began traveling regularly to the South Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married the everyday observation with mystical symbolism—a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called “primitive” arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin’s rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world, has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist as a “wandering mystic”. (The Art Story)