Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, spent part of his childhood in Peru, worked as a stockbroker, and came to painting relatively late — a trajectory as unconventional as the art he would produce. Initially an Impressionist Sunday painter, he abandoned his family and career in the mid-1880s to devote himself entirely to art, seeking a more primal, symbolic mode of expression that would transcend what he saw as the superficiality of Impressionism.
After periods in Brittany — where he developed Synthetism, a style of bold outlines, flat colour fields, and non-naturalistic colour inspired by medieval stained glass, Japanese prints, and folk art — Gauguin sailed for Tahiti in 1891, seeking what he called “the savage” and “the primitive.” His Polynesian paintings — Spirit of the Dead Watching, Arearea, Where Do We Come From? — present Tahitian life in a palette of saturated, anti-naturalistic colour, blending observed reality with mythological and spiritual invention.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898), his largest and most ambitious canvas, is a philosophical allegory stretching over twelve feet, reading right to left as a meditation on the cycle of human life. Gauguin died in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, impoverished and in poor health. His influence on the Nabis, Fauves, and German Expressionists was profound, and his insistence that art should express the invisible rather than merely depict the visible opened doors that the twentieth century would rush through.