Paul Gauguin - Artwork, Relationship with Van Gogh

Van Gogh's Friends

Youth of Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France to journalist Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal, daughter of the half-Peruvian proto-socialist leader Flora Tristan, a feminist precursor. In 1851 the family left Paris for Peru, motivated by the political climate of the period. They lived for four years in Lima, Peru with Paul's uncle and his family. The imagery of Peru would later influence Gauguin in his art.

At the age of seven, Gauguin and his family returned to France. They moved to Orléans, France to live with his grandfather. He soon learned French and excelled in his studies. At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine to fulfill his required military service. Three years later, he joined the French navy where he stayed for two years. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. In 1873, he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad. Over the next ten years, they had five children.

By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he pursued a business career as a stockbroker. Driven to paint full-time, he returned to Paris in 1885, leaving his family in Denmark. Without adequate subsistence, his wife and their five children returned to her family. Like his friend Vincent van Gogh, with whom in 1888 he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, Paul Gauguin experienced bouts of depression and at one time attempted suicide.

Gauguin began painting in his free time. He also visited galleries frequently and purchased work by emerging artists. Gauguin formed a friendship with artist Camille Pissarro, who introduced him to various other artists. As he progressed in his art, Gauguin rented a studio, and showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. Over two summer holidays, he painted with Camille Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne.

> Read more ... Paul Gauguin Arearea Musee d'Orsay

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed; contemplating it, everyone can create a story at the will of his imagination and-with a single glance-have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections; no effort of memory, everything is summed up in one instant.

A complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sounds. But in painting a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, so that the judgment experiences a continuous fatigue if it wants to reunite the end with the beginning. The ear is actually a sense inferior to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at a time, whereas the sight takes in everything and simultaneously simplifies it at will.

The vaguest, the most indefinable, the most varied is precisely matter. Thought is a slave of sensations. I have always wondered why one speaks of noble instincts.

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The Moon and the Earth - Powered by Google

The Moon and the Earth is Gauguin's depiction of an ancient Polynesian myth, which he had read in the accounts of the early-nineteenth-century Dutch explorer J. A. Moerenhout. According to the myth, Hina, the female spirit of the Moon, implores Fatou, the male spirit of the Earth.

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Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were two of the greatest painters of the late 19th century. A brief but intense collaboration occurred between the two artists.

They met in Paris in the autumn of 1887. Each man tried to learn from the other and admired the other's work. Their collaboration was marked at first by mutual support and dialogue, but there was also competition and friction.

The men differed sharply in their views on art: Gauguin favored working from memory and allowing abstract mental processes to shape his images, while Vincent held an unshakeable reverence for the physical reality of the observable world of models and Nature. This is reflected in the very different techniques each artist used. But toward the end of 1888, a series of violent incidents around Christmas Eve brought a dramatic end to their collaboration. This is the story of their personal and professional relationship.

> Read more ... Van Gogh Museum Paul Gauguin The breakthrough into modernity

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