Paul Gauguin: Colour, Myth, and the Edge of the World

A Most Unlikely Artist

Paul Gauguin was thirty-five years old and working as a successful Paris stockbroker when he decided to become a painter. The decision baffled his colleagues and, eventually, estranged his Danish wife and five children. Yet it gave the world one of the most distinctive and consequential bodies of work in modern art.

Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent part of his childhood in Peru, and something of that early encounter with colour and warmth seems to have lodged permanently in his imagination. Back in France he worked dutifully in finance through his twenties, collecting Impressionist paintings on the side. He befriended Camille Pissarro and exhibited with the Impressionists in the 1880s. But by 1883 the lure of painting had become irresistible. He resigned, picked up his brushes, and never looked back.

Breaking with Europe

Gauguin quickly grew restless with the muted, grey-skied palette of northern France. He sought out colour and simplicity, first in Brittany, where he was drawn to the bold outlines of folk art and medieval stonework. In the village of Pont-Aven he gathered a circle of younger painters and forged a style he called Synthetism: flat planes of unmodulated colour, dark contours, and a deliberate retreat from the photographic naturalism that still dominated academic painting. His work "The Vision After the Sermon" from 1888 made the approach unmistakable — figures in Breton coifs watching Jacob wrestle the angel, the ground an almost hallucinatory vermilion.

A stormy two-month stay with Vincent van Gogh in Arles ended in crisis, but Gauguin emerged from it with his ambitions clarified. Europe, he had decided, was spiritually exhausted. He needed a world that had not yet been poisoned by industrialism and rationalism.

Tahiti and the Masterworks

In 1891 Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, and though he found the island already much changed by French colonialism, he constructed an inner vision of it as an Eden he could paint into existence. The results are astonishing. Large canvases of warm ochres, mauves, and cobalt blues depict Polynesian women resting, fishing, or lost in thought. "Ia Orana Maria" — a Tahitian Annunciation — fuses Catholic iconography with Polynesian bodies and tropical foliage in a way that is neither purely Western nor purely Polynesian, but entirely Gauguin's own.

His supreme statement came near the end of his life: the vast triptych "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" painted in 1897 on coarse sacking in a single sustained effort, measuring nearly four metres wide. He called it his testament. It mingles figures at every stage of life beneath a Pacific sky, asking questions that no one image can answer. It hangs today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

He also produced remarkable woodblock prints and ceramics, applying the same flattened, mythic sensibility to whatever material was at hand.

A Complicated Legacy

Gauguin died in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, impoverished and in ill health. His life raises difficult questions that contemporary audiences rightly press: his relationships with young Polynesian girls were exploitative by any modern measure, and his romanticisation of the Pacific often tells us more about European fantasies than about actual Polynesian cultures. These critiques are part of the record.

What remains undeniable is his formal achievement. The flat colour, the spiritual subject matter, the liberation from literal description — all of it flowed forward into Fauvism, Expressionism, and much of twentieth-century art. Matisse and Picasso both acknowledged the debt.

On Mojud you can explore Paul Gauguin's paintings up close — from his Breton experiments to the great Tahitian canvases. View them in detail, download high-resolution images for free, or order a museum-grade print to bring one of these sun-drenched visions into your home. Mojud holds around 179 of his works, making it one of the more complete public collections available online.