Gauguin1848-1903

Early Life

• Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7th June 1848; the son of a Journalist and a mother of Peruvian descent.

• He spent most of his first 6 years of life being brought up in Peru as a result of the war in France at that time.

• He returned with his family to France when he was 7 years old.

• Gauguin missed Peru and when he was 17 years old, he decided to join the merchant navy and went to sea for 3 years.

• This experience influenced his decision to serve in the French Navy when it was time for him to do his National Military Service.

• Aged 23, he left the Navy and became a stockbroker in Paris.

• 2 years later he married a Danish girl and after 10 years of happy marriage he has a good job, a supportive wife and 5 children….

• It is now 1883……

The Journey from Stockbroker to Artist

• In the 1870’s, when he was in his early 20’s, Gauguin began painting as a hobby.

‘Port de Grenelle’ 1875

• He started collecting Impressionist paintings which he based his own work on.

Riverbank in Winter 1881

A Hen House 1885

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-gauguin/by-period/early-works

• Although most self-taught, Gauguin had some lessons from the Impressionist – Camille Pissarro in 1874.

‘Bridge at Montfoucault’ 1874Pissarro

Trees in the Farmyard, 1874Gauguin

• Pissarro introduced Gauguin to the other Impressionist and he became a member of the Impressionist movement, exhibiting with them from 1879 onwards.

• His paintings were well received by the critics, so….

• In 1883, he gave up his well paid job to pursue a career as a professional artist.

Early Artistic Career

• Gauguin had a poor first year as a professional artist.• Gauguin’s wife insisted that the family move to Denmark

to her family as they had used up all their savings.• Gauguin hated Denmark, so left his wife and family and

returned to Paris a year later with his 6 year old son.• However this was a disaster and the boy almost died due

to malnourishment, so Gauguin returned the boy to the family and from then on had little to do with them.

“Paris is a desert for a poor man. I must get my energy back and I’m going to Panama to live like a native”. (Gauguin, 1886)

This trip in 1886 was a disaster and he returned to Paris after 4 weeks as a result of sickness and poverty.

Gauguin & Van Gogh

• Gauguin moved to Brittany in the north of France in 1887 and the following year in 1888 he accepted an invite from Van Gogh to live and work with him in Arles in the south of France

‘The Painter of Sunflowers’ by Gauguin, 1888

Van Gogh ‘Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin’ 1888.

Gauguin ‘Self-Portrait’ 1889

‘Landscape Farmhouse in Arles’ 1888 by Gauguin

‘The Yellow House’ 1888 by Van Gogh

• The friendship between Van Gogh and Gauguin turned sour after just two months living together after they had a final big fight and Van Gogh cut his ear off and started his descent into madness.

• However, this period between Brittany and Arles was extremely creative and productive for Gauguin.

A summary of Gauguin’s work up to this point in his career.

• He initially modelled himself as an Impressionist painter, but he soon felt that Impressionist was too limited in scope for him

• Because he developed the ideas of impressionism, Gauguin is considered a Post-Impressionist:- the Impressionists wanted to paint directly from nature and record a fleeting moment of light but Gauguin wanted more than how things looked. He wanted to express…..

EMOTION

Gauguin was one of the first artists to reject the idea that a painting has to represent something we can see in the real world, so after initially taking inspiration from the Impressionists, he then took inspiration from the new direction of non-Western art traditions; not only Japanese art but ‘Primitive’ art; particularly the work of Central and South America.

Japanese art

Primitive art – Central America

Gauguin was also inspired by Egyptian…

‘We Shall not go to the Market Today’ Gauguin, 1892

Egyptian wall art

And Cambodian Sculptures

A main visual characteristic of Gauguin’s work at this time is his expressive use of strong colour

‘Vision after the Sermon’

• This is a revolutionary painting which uses completely unnaturalistic colours to convey the emotional tone of the painting – one of visionary intensity.

• This painting merges reality with symbolism

Subject matter

• Peasant women experience a vision of Jacob – the father of Israel – wrestling an angel. The scene happens in a Breton churchyard and the women are in traditional Breton dress. The vision is from an old testament story and Gauguin may be suggesting that the priest (bottom right in the image) is delivering the story as part of the sermon.

Composition• Gauguin utilises ‘snapshot’ composition which shows influence

of both Japanese art and the Impressionists. • The tree cuts through the format of the painting creating a

strong diagonal composition and is a tool which he uses to separate reality (the congregation) with fantasy (the angel wrestling Jacob).

• There is no horizon line and little traditional perspective used in the painting. Gauguin is further developing the use of non-traditional perspective as we had seen in Impressionist paintings such as Monet’s waterlillies and Manet’s ‘Dejeuner’. Gauguin reduces the painting to interlocking shapes of flat colour which show the influence of Japanese art and Egyptian friezes.

Colour

• Unlike the Impressionists who built up their colour with small strokes of paint, Gauguin uses large areas of flat colour.

• In this painting the ground is painting blood red to represent the spiritual battle. He balances the red with the white headdresses of the women.

• Complementary colours are used to model the forms and tones of the women’s costumes.

• Each shape is strongly outlined in order to keep each separate from each other.

Brushwork/Technique

• Unlike the Impressionists, in this painting Gauguin’s brushwork is mostly smooth and flat, but there are suggestions of directional modelling in the headdress and clothes of the congreation.

‘The Yellow Christ’ 1889

In this almost exclusively monochrome painting, Gauguin expresses the reality of prayer and the religious experience of

the Breton people

Subject MatterPeasant women kneel to pray at a roadside crucifix in Brittany. The background describes the hills and a village in the area.

CompositionOnce again Gauguin employs snapshot composition. Gauguin is also using the rule of thirds, where the crucifix is placed on the left hand vertical. The image is again made up of flat areas (shapes) of colour which are deliberately reminiscent of medieval stained glass.

ColourGauguin uses unrealistic colour; the yellow of the Christ and the fields; the reds of the trees. This is all to draw out attention to the ‘unworldliness’ of the scene.

Brushwork/techniqueThere are examples of directional brushwork in the clothes and on the trees but for the most part Gauguin uses flat areas of colour. He uses strong outlines around each form, this assists in the visual connection to stained glass as it is reminiscent of the lead surrounds of the glass.

Gauguin & Tahiti

Background

Whether due to his mixed race background, his childhood in Peru, his time at sea or his trip to Panama; Gauguin always had a love of the exotic or the other. Even when in France, he turned his back on fashionable Paris and chose to predominantly work in Brittany, an area which was proud of its individuality and culturally very different to Paris and the rest of France. Although Gauguin would have aligned himself more with those ‘others’ than with French society, he was never really ‘an other’. In his Tahitian paintings in particular, he is suggesting a romantic, idealised view of Tahiti which is what Gauguin wants Tahiti to be more than it’s reality.

Moving to Tahiti

In 1891 Gauguin sailed to Tahiti as he had never lost his yearning for the tropics. Initially he was disappointed as the colonialism there reminded him too much of Paris and he said:

“It is Europe all over again, just what I thought I had broken away from – made still worse by colonial snobbery”

• However when he moved from the capital to the countryside he discovered the ‘paradise’ he was looking for. • He began a relationship with a 13

year old Tahitian girl who shared his hut with him and Gauguin painted her many times.

• Life was a struggle however and as he lacked skills in farming or fishing, most of his food was in the form of European canned goods which were very expensive and which he could only buy infrequently.

• He had so little money he could hardly afford paint or canvas so as a result he began to apply his paint very thinly to un-primed canvas. This technique is very characteristic of Gauguin’s work at this time.

The Market

‘The White Horse’

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Returning to France

• As Gauguin had so little money, in 1883 he had to apply to the Governor of Tahiti to be repatriated (sent back) to France.

• He was humiliated to return but he brought back many of his paintings that he made there and her persuaded a leading Paris gallery owner to give him an exhibition of these works.

• Although he didn’t sell much, he did create a lot of interest in the art world.

An unexpected windfall

• Also at this time, Gauguin inherited enough money from an uncle that died.

• This money allowed him to set up a studio in Paris, but he really wanted to return to Tahiti, so he set sail again in July 1895.

• The next 8 years were often miserable for Gauguin personally but artworks that would be considered some of his greatest would be created in this period.

‘Where do we come from? What are we Where Are we going to?’ 1897-8

• This huge mural-like canvas (139.1 x 374.6cm) was painted in Gauguin’s Tahitian hut in December 1897.

• The story of the painting is as a result of Gauguin’s emotional state following the death of his favourite daughter Aline and Gauguin’s ailing health and state of poverty.

• This painting is a summary of Gauguin’s ideas of the mysteries of human life.

• He worked day and night on the painting and as soon as he finished it he tried to kill himself by arsenic poisoning.

“I wanted to paint a large canvas and put all my energy into it before dying” Gauguin

• The painting should be read from right to left.• The three women and child at the bottom

right represent the beginning of life.• The middle group represent the daily

existence of young adulthood.• In the final group we see an old woman who

Gauguin wrote “an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts”, at her feet is a bird which “represents the futility of words”.

Gauguin said of the painting

“I shall never do anything better, or even like it”

Gauguin’s last years

• In 1898 Gauguin continued to be depressed and even thought about abandoning painting altogether. He was so poor he was forced to take a job as a draughtsman to pay of some of his debt.

• He also was annoyed by the colonialism and made a bad name for himself locally but continually writing angry letters to the newspapers and the government.

• In 1901, Gauguin left Tahiti and moved to the Marquesas Islands 800 miles away. Here he built his last dwelling which he called ‘the House of Pleasure’.

• At last he was getting money from the sale of his paintings in Paris.

• However he still continued to wage a war with the authorities an din 1903 they took their revenge by sentencing him to 3 months in prison for ‘defamation’.

• He never served the sentence as he died on 8th May 1903, aged 54 whilst awaiting the results of an appeal.