Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris to a journalist father and a mother of Peruvian descent.

After his father died during the family's voyage to South America, Gauguin lived with his mother's relatives in Lima before returning to France.

As a young man Gauguin sailed the world for several years as a merchant seaman and then in the French navy.

Gauguin, then a successful Paris stockbroker, married the Danish woman Mette-Sophie Gad, with whom he had five children before the marriage broke down.

An amateur painter mentored by Camille Pissarro, Gauguin showed work in the Impressionist exhibitions from 1879 to 1886 before leaving finance to paint full-time.

Gauguin painted at the artists' colony of Pont-Aven, where he developed a flat, boldly outlined Synthetist style in works such as Vision After the Sermon (1888).

Gauguin spent nine weeks painting with Van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles, a collaboration that ended abruptly after the crisis in which Van Gogh mutilated his ear.

Seeking an escape from European civilization, Gauguin sailed to Tahiti, where he painted many of his most famous canvases of Polynesian life.

During his second Tahitian period Gauguin completed his monumental philosophical canvas, which he regarded as his masterpiece.

Gauguin died at the age of 54 in Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, where he had settled in 1901, and was buried in the local Calvary Cemetery.