Paul Gauguin

Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent his early childhood in Peru - a privileged six years that marked him. Back in France, he became a stockbroker who painted on weekends until the 1882 financial crisis pushed him toward art full-time. Camille Pissarro taught him Impressionist technique, and Gauguin exhibited with that circle in the early 1880s before breaking toward bolder color and stranger subjects in Brittany and Martinique. By the 1890s he'd fled to Tahiti, then the Marquesas, painting vivid Symbolist canvases of native life while broke and sick. He died in 1903, moderately successful at best. Dealer Ambroise Vollard mounted posthumous shows in Paris, and the work caught fire - Picasso and Matisse studied it, and Gauguin's Synthetist experiments became a cornerstone of modernism.