Paul Gauguin 1848-1903

Gauguin was one of the leading French painters of the Post Impressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Although his main achievements were to lie elsewhere, Gauguin was, to use a fanciful metaphor, nursed in the bosom of Impressionism. His attitudes to art were deeply influenced by his experience of its first exhibition, and he himself participated in those of 1880, 1881 and 1882.

In 1874 Gauguin he saw the first Impressionist exhibition, confirmed his desire to become a painter. He began working with Camille Pissarro and showed in every Impressionist exhibition between 1879 and 1886. Pissarro took a special interest in his attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should `look for the nature that suits your temperament', and in 1876 Gauguin had a landscape in the style of Pissarro accepted at the Salon. Pissarro also  introduced him to Cézanne.In 1885/6 he met Degas and Van Gogh in Paris. a self-designated Synthetist, he was welcomed in Paris by the Symbolist literary and artistic circle.He traveled to Panama and Martinique in 1887 in search of more exotic subject matter, increasingly looking to primitive cultures for inspiration. As

Gauguin's art has all the appearance of a flight from civilisation, of a search for new ways of life, more primitive, more real and more sincere. His break away from a solid middle-class world, abandoning family, children and job, his refusal to accept easy glory and easy gain are the best-known aspects of Gauguin's fascinating life and personality. The picture known as Two women on the beach, was painted in 1891, shortly after Gauguin's arrival in Tahiti. During his first stay there, Gauguin discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and the violent colors belonging to an untamed nature. In 1899 he championed the cause of French settlers in Tahiti in a political journal, Les Guêpes, and founded his own periodical, Le Sourire.