PAUL  GAUGIN

born the  7  June  1848  To  Paris  and dead the  8  may  1903  To  Atuona  ( Hiva Oa ) to  Marquesas Islands , is a  painter  post-impressionist  French .

Leader of the Pont-Aven School  and inspirer of  nabis , he is considered one of the major French painters of  twentieth century , and one of the most important precursors of modern art with  Klimt ,  Cezanne ,  Munch ,  Seurat  and  van Gogh .

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Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born at 56, rue Notre-Dame de Lorette in Paris, in 1848. His father, Clovis Louis Pierre Guillaume Gauguin (1814-1851), was a republican journalist in  National . Her mother, Aline Chazal (1825-1867), is the daughter of  Flora Tristan  and the little girl of  Therese Laisnay  and Mariano de Tristán y Moscoso, a military member of a family of noble landowners  spanish  of  Peru .

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The painter spent his early childhood in  Lima , where his father, who died in 1851 during the voyage from France, off the coast of  Punta arenas  and buried in  Puerto del Hambre , came to flee the political regime of  Napoleon III , author of a coup d'état which consolidated his power. Back in France at the age of 7, Paul studied in Orléans, first in a boarding school in the city then, between 1859 and 1862, in  small seminar of La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin  . After failing the entrance exam to the Naval School (prepared in Paris between 1862 and 1864), he returned to  Orléans , and enrolled during the school year 1864-1865 at the imperial high school on rue Jeanne-d'Arc. Gauguin then embarked on the Luzitano clipper as a novice / pilot in December 1865, registered in Le Havre under the number 790-3157. He is also learning to play the accordion. He obtained the rank of lieutenant and in 1866 embarked on the three-master Chili, of which he was second lieutenant. He subsequently performed, in 1868, his military service in the  navy , embarked on the Jérôme-Napoléon corvette. He participates in the  g uerre 1870  and takes part in the capture of six German ships. After his return to Toulon on April 23, 1871, he left the navy.

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He becomes  stockbroker  on the Paris Bourse and has had some success in its business. He then shares a comfortable bourgeois life with his wife  Danish ,  Mette-Sophie Gad  (1850-1920), and their five children:  Emile  (es)  (1874-1955), Aline, Clovis,  Jean-René  (1881-1961), who would become a sculptor, and  Paul-Rollon (or Pola )  (1883-1961). He moved with his family in 1877, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, first rue des Fourneaux (now  rue Falguière ), then  Carcel street .

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His tutor,  Gustave Arosa , businessman and great art lover, introduced Gauguin to the Impressionists. In  1874 , he meets the painter  Camille Pissarro  and sees the first exhibition of the Impressionist movement. Like his tutor, he became an art lover and then tried his hand at painting. He therefore exhibited with the Impressionists in 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882 and  1886

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In 1882, he gave up his job as a stock broker (which was in a phase of bad economic times, with the bankruptcy of the General Union ) to devote himself to his new passion, la  painting . From January to November 1884, he settled at  Rouen , where  Camille Pissarro , who had guided him in his approach to Impressionism , also lives. During these ten months spent in Rouen, he produced nearly forty paintings, mainly views of the city and its surroundings. This is not enough to live and he leaves to live with his wife and children in her family in  Copenhagen . He gives up painting to become a representative in tarred canvas; but he is not good at this job, his business is bad and his in-laws reproach him for his bohemian lifestyle. He therefore returned to Paris in 1885 to paint full time, leaving his wife and children in Denmark, not having the means to ensure their subsistence; he is torn by this situation. From 1879 to 1886, he participated in the last five exhibitions of the group of impressionists. In 1885, Paul Gauguin began to work on  ceramic  and partners with  Ernest Chaplet  to produce 50 ceramic works. That same year, he frequents the coffee shop  Au Tambourin , run by  Agostina Segatori , an Italian model, at 62  boulevard de Clichy

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In 1886, on the advice of Armand Félix Marie Jobbé-Duval , Gauguin made a first stay in  Aven bridge  in Brittany, where he meets  Émile Bernard , holder of  cloisonnism . Back in Paris, he meets for the first time  Vincent van Gogh , in November of the same year.

In April 1887, he embarked with the painter  Charles Laval  for the  Panama  where they will work on the piercing of the  channel . They encounter particularly difficult living conditions there and decide to leave as soon as they have collected enough money for the  Martinique , which Gauguin had discovered during a stopover.

After a stay on the island of Taboga , he joined Martinique where he remained in precarious conditions, from June to October 1887, at Anse Turin in  Carbet  two kilometers from  Saint-Pierre , where there is, still today, an Interpretation Center dedicated to him. Enthused by the light and the landscapes, he painted seventeen canvases during his stay.

“My experience in Martinique is decisive. Only then did I really feel myself, and it is in what I have reported that I must be sought if people want to know who I am, even more than in my works in Brittany. "(Paul Gauguin at  Charles Morice , 1891)

Sick of  dysentery  and  malaria , and without resources to live, Gauguin returned to the metropolis in November 1887. Laval extended his stay until 1888

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Back in France, he lived in Paris then he joined, at the beginning of 1888, in  Bretagne , a group of experimental painters, younger because he was then in his forties, known as the Pont-Aven school . In an 1888 letter written to  Émile Schuffenecker , Paul Gauguin expresses his credo to him which will be the soul of future artistic challenges:

“A word of advice, don't copy too much from nature, art is an abstraction, draw it from nature by dreaming in front of it, and think more about the creation than the result. It is the only way to ascend to God by doing like our divine Master, create. "

The Breton innkeeper Marie-Angélique Satre (1868-1932) alias "La Belle Angèle" was immortalized in 1889 by Paul Gauguin, whose work  La Belle Angele  (title written in capital letters on the canvas) is currently kept at  Orsay museum .

Under the influence of the painter  Émile Bernard , innovative and very religious, his style evolves: it becomes more natural and more synthetic. He seeks his inspiration in exotic art, medieval stained glass windows and Japanese prints, to paint modern works that are spiritually charged with meaning. That year, he painted The Vision after the Sermon also called Jacob's Struggle with the Angel, which would influence  Pablo Picasso ,  Henri Matisse  and  Edvard Munch .

  This work is for Gauguin the means of representing "a collective hallucination". By simplicity, he unites the style and the theme of prayer, important for painters since the Renaissance. Gauguin, however, deals with the subject in another way, by not representing women in very significant positions, because there is only one woman who is seen praying. The entire upper right-hand side is left for Jacob's Struggle with the Angel, a vision quite "superstitious" for Gauguin, which determines the attitude of women and the representation of their religious credulity, significant of the inhabitants of Pont-Aven, representatives of 'rustic provincial archaism. 

For his painting representing a yellow Christ, he would have been inspired by the sculpture of the chapel of Tremalo, near Pont-Aven.  

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Gauguin joins  Vincent Van Gogh  who invited him to come to  Arles , in the south of France, in 1888, thanks to his brother,  Theodorus . He discovers Japanese prints through  Vincent van Gogh , while they spent two months together (from October to December) painting. They then paint the series on  Alyscamps , portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The two colleagues are very sensitive and experience moments of depression 

Brought together by a common interest in color, the two painters come into a personal and artistic conflict, which culminates when Gauguin paints Van Gogh painting sunflowers, a portrait of which Van Gogh will say: “It is indeed me, but gone mad. "Their cohabitation turns badly and ends on the famous episode of the cut off ear of Van Gogh, December 23, 1888

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In 1891, ruined, he lived for a time in Paris, at the Hôtel Delambre, at no.35 of the  street of the same name  in the  14th arrondissement . Inspired by the work of  Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout  and thanks to a sale of his works, the success of which was assured by two enthusiastic articles by Octave Mirbeau , he embarked for the  Polynesia  and moved to  Tahiti  (it is there that he paints the portrait of  Suzanne Bambridge )  He now spends his entire life in these tropical regions, first in  Tahiti  then in  Hiva Oa Island  in the Marquesas archipelago . He returned to mainland France only once.

The essential characteristics of his painting (including the use of large areas of bright colors) did not undergo much change. He pays particular attention to the expressiveness of colors, the search for perspective and the use of full and voluminous shapes. Influenced by the tropical environment and Polynesian culture, his work is gaining strength, he produces woodcarvings and paints his most beautiful paintings, in particular his major work, today in  Boston Museum of Fine Arts  :  Where do we come from ? Who are we? Where are we going ? , which he himself considers as his pictorial testament.

In Tahiti, he meets Teha'amana (also called Tehura), a young girl from  Rarotonga  in the  Cook Islands , west of French Polynesia (Gauguin believes it to originate from the  Tong Islands a ). This one, aged thirteen, becomes his model. At the age of 43, he began a relationship with her. He was very inspired and painted seventy canvases in a few months. After a few happy years, administrative worries, the death of his daughter Aline in 1897 and health problems (following an assault, he had a leg injury that has not healed since 1894) undermined him. He is forced to sell his paintings to buy morphine and arsenic which soothe his leg wounds. He also contracts a  syphilis  shortly before his departure

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He was repatriated to France, to Paris, in 1893, and was not too well received. He gets in touch with Annah the Javanese, thanks to  Ambroise Vollard , in Paris, then in  Pont-Aven . He has a broken shin during an altercation at  Concarneau  the  25  may  1894 , responsible for his lameness, his cane, his pains,  laudanum . He leaves alone on  3  July  1895  for Tahiti. He moved in with Pau'ura (fourteen years old), painted again, got drunk, grew bitter, wrote and caricature in small ephemeral newspapers Le Sourire (serious newspaper), Le Sourire (bad newspaper). He was hired by the mayor of Papeete, François Cardella, for the monthly Les Guêpes, until the departure of Governor Gustave Gallet, fought by the Catholic Party.

He then decides to finally leave for  the Marquesas Islands , where he landed on September 16, 1901, in order to find inspiration. Arrive at  Atuona  (on the island of  Hiva Oa ), he meets the nurse of the dispensary, the deported Annamite  Ky Dong  (vi)  (1875-1929), the American Ben Varney and the Breton Émile Frébault. Bishop Martin, head of the Catholic Mission, ended up selling him marshland. He built a house on stilts there, which he named as a provocation  House of Enjoyment . It seems to him to be in paradise. He will quickly become disillusioned when he realizes the abuses of the colonial administration. In particular, he refuses to pay his taxes and encourages the Marquesans to do the same. He tries unsuccessfully to own a plantation and become a justice of the peace.

As soon as he arrived in the Marquesas, he removed from the Catholic school, with the agreement of the head of a small village, Marie-Rose Vaeoho (1887-1914), 13 years old, 39 years younger than him, who became her  vahine . Pregnant, she was sent to her village to give birth to their daughter Tikaomata and the painter, wanting to make fun of the bishop, replaced her with Henriette, a student of the Sisters' school and wife of the  serving mass .

He continued trial after trial and, on March 31, 1903, he was sentenced to a fine of five hundred francs and three months in prison for defamation of a police sergeant.  Ambroise Vollard , with whom he is under contract, pays him monthly installments of 300 francs, and provides him free canvas and colors, against a minimum of twenty-five paintings per year, mainly still lifes for which the dealer has set the unit price at 200 francs.

Weakened, his leg injury turned into a very painful purulent eczema, tired of struggling and gnawed at by  syphilis , he died on May 8, 1903 as a cursed artist in a miserable hut. He is buried in the cemetery of Atuona. He left a bad reputation on the spot after his death, with Polynesians in general and Marquesans in particular, who have the impression of having dealt with a man who used Polynesians, especially women, as if that was owed to him, but also to certain colonists (the bishop, the administration, the gendarmes with whom he had incessant quarrels).

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