Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), French post-impressionist painter. Having abandoned his family and his banking career to devote himself to painting in 1881, he led a bohemian life in Paris, Martinique, and Brittany. After a disastrous collaboration with Van Gogh in Arles, he left Europe (1891) to live the simple life in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he died. Gauguin was much influenced by the art of the primitive people amongst whom he had chosen to make his home and painted some of his finest pictures in Polynesia. His symbolism in such paintings as Nevermore, together with his revolutionary use of pure unmixed colour exerted a great influence on 20th-century art.
