Paul Gauguin — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He ditched a Paris stockbroker's desk for Tahiti's heat and color, chasing something primal that polite European painting wouldn't touch. The work scandalized, then defined how the avant-garde saw the primitive.

Biography

About

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 be…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

said20 Nov 1889

With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream.

— in a letter to Theo van Gogh (1889-11-20)

Paul Gauguin

saidJun 1888

This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c.

— Quote in a letter (June 1888) to Gauguin's friend Émile Schuffenecker; as cited in Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, Anne Distel,

Paul Gauguin

said1888

In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious...

— p. 24: quote in his letter to Vincent van Gogh, c. 1888

Paul Gauguin

said1886

I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting.

— p. 109: in a letter to a friend, c. 1886

Paul Gauguin

said14 Jan 1885