Paul Gauguin, a French stockbroker turned painter, was born in Paris on June 7, 1848. He died on May 8, 1903, on Hiva Oa, an island in the South Pacific.
He painted in flat patches of strong color ringed by dark lines, lived nine weeks with Vincent van Gogh in Arles and sailed for Tahiti in 1891. His Tahitian pictures made him famous, as did the night Van Gogh cut off his own ear after they fell out.
The legend made him a free man who found paradise in Tahiti. His most famous canvas, painted there at the end of 1897, tells a darker story. Its title asks three questions: where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going.
By then Gauguin was ill, deep in debt and back in Tahiti for a second stay. In April 1897 a letter from Copenhagen, where his wife lived with their children, told him that his daughter Aline had died of pneumonia.
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Before the year was out he began a canvas about twelve feet long and four and a half feet high. It reads from right to left, like a life: a sleeping baby among crouching women, a young figure picking fruit in the middle, an old woman near death on the left. Behind them stands a blue idol.
He meant the picture as his last act. Once it was finished, he swallowed arsenic, as he later told his friend the painter Daniel de Monfreid. He survived and went on working, and in 1898 the dealer Ambroise Vollard showed the canvas in Paris.
That blue idol hides a second story. The legend has Gauguin stepping ashore among people who still prayed to their ancient gods. What he really found there, and where the idol came from, is what the legend leaves out.
A stockbroker who painted on Sundays
Paul Gauguin's life began with another voyage south…
What You'll Discover
Why a stockbroker walked out on the exchange.
Why the ground in his vision is red.
What really happened in the Yellow House.
What Tahiti gave him instead.
Who the girl in the dark was.
Whom he fought in his last year.