Paul Gauguin - Post-Impressionist Painter

Artist Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848 in Paris, France. His family lived in Peru from 1851-1855 before moving back to France. When he was 17, Gauguin worked as a pilot’s assistant in the Merchant Marine; he joined the navy in 1868. After leaving the navy in 1871, Gauguin found work as a stockbroker. In 1873, he married Mette Sophie Gad; they had 5 children.

Paul Gauguin received no formal art training. Starting in 1881, he started showing his paintings in Impressionist exhibitions and became friends with Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne. Gauguin was influenced by Asian and African art and became a leader of the post-Impressionist movement.

In 1885, after having being abandoned by her husband again, his wife and their children moved back with her family in Denmark.

In 1888, Gauguin lived in Arles, France with his friend Vincent Van Gogh. A new book by Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans makes the claim that it was Gauguin who cut off Van Gogh’s ear lobe in 1888 and not the artist himself. By 1891, Gauguin had left his family and France behind and moved to Tahiti. He returned to France only briefly. Gauguin kept journals of his life in Polynesia and wrote a book about his life in Tahiti called Noa Noa on one of those visits back to France. Some of his most famous paintings are ones he did while living in the South Seas.

Paul Gauguin died on May 8, 1903 in French Polynesia just before he was to start serving a 3-month prison sentence for slander. He died of syphilis.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts


We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.


Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.


There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite


Civilization is what makes you sick.


I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.


It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.