Everyone knows the bright and exotic canvases of the French painter Paul Gauguin. The largest representative of post-impressionism lived a bright and complex life.
Enchantment of the Tropics
He was born in Paris in June 1848 in the family of a Republican journalist and eminent Peruvian. A year after the birth of the baby, the family moved to South America, on the way there, Paul Gauguin's father died of a heart ailment. Until the age of seven, little Paul lived in the family of his mother among the colorful landscapes of hot Peru. Then a passion for the tropics, travels and iridescent joyful shades with which his painting will be filled was born in his soul.
Youth genius
At the age of seven, the boy returns to France with his mother. Biography of Paul Gauguin is now associated with study. At seventeen, he holds an exam at the Maritime College, but does not go there. Then the young man goes to sea as a cadet on a ship that plows the Mediterranean and North Seas. The impressions of those years also did not remain in the future fate of Gauguin without incarnation in his artistic plastic works. Having received a dying letter from his mother, Paul realizes that happiness is entirely in his hands: long sea wanderings tore him from his family, depriving him of hope for help. However, he finds her in the person of his mother’s old friend, a broker, who arranges Paul Gauguin for the position of broker on the stock exchange and in every possible way takes care of the young man.
Passion for exquisite
Then years of prosperity and prosperity follow. Gauguin marries the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, breeds expensive varieties of roses in his garden and collects paintings by impressionists - he has a special passion for them. And, of course, he writes himself. The first paintings find a lively response from professionals. Personal acquaintance with the impressionists Pissarro and Degas becomes not only a source of new inspiration and self-confidence, but also a serious financial support. Degas buys Paul Gauguin paintings for his collection and convinces major merchants to do the same.
The choice
In 1885, Gauguin left the exchange business, as well as his wife and children, and left Copenhagen, where Gauguins lived at that time, first to France and then to Brittany. Now his whole life is subordinated only to art. He is friends with artists, makes short trips to different countries. In 1888, Gauguin settled in Arles, where his famous colleague Vincent Van Gogh decided to establish a partnership of artists. Classes in painting do not bring the income that Gauguin once had from successful exchange transactions. Cold and hunger freeze the master’s soul, but he doesn’t give up.
Earthly paradise
Increasingly, Gauguin turns to exciting children's experiences, enjoying the memory of the riot of colors and smells of exotic South American villages near the ocean. Observing the growth of scientific and technological progress in cities, the artist is more inclined to consider civilization as an ailment that fetters people, he sees healing in the bosom of beautiful and wild nature. Then he decides to settle away from the boiling megacities Paul Gauguin. The island of Tahiti became for him the home and abode of the muses. He wrote canvases and poems. At the same time, these were years of distress. His paintings in France were still sold, but very inexpensively. Soon, money was no longer sent from Paris to him. Then he asked to send him flower seeds.
Near his modest hut, the artist created a magnificent flower garden. It was a challenge to trials and a statement of living eternal beauty. Here Paul Gauguin also found a new love. The artist became the father of the babies whom the beautiful young Tahitian woman gave birth to. The artist likens the relationship with her to the happiness of the first people - Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Paintings full of crafty tenderness and all-encompassing harmony date back to this time - the paintings “Motherhood”, “Two Tahitian women,” “Are you jealous?” At the same time, Gauguin is passionate about creating sculptures. He inspiredly sculpts them from clay and covers them with wax. The figures of people and animals make the locals freeze in horror and delight.
His immortal inheritance
Interest in mythology, ancient legends and the eastern imaginative system makes Gauguin's works incredibly mysterious and attractive. It is hard to believe that these bewitching emotional landscapes, portraits, plot compositions were created by a man exhausted by poverty, illnesses and depression, who almost led to suicide. The artist died in the spring of 1903 on the island of Khiva-Oa, in Oceania. He was fifty-fourth. Fame found Gauguin three years after his death. At the Paris exhibition exhibited more than two hundred of his paintings, which were wildly successful.
Today, the life and creative biography of Paul Gauguin is of the same interest as his immortal creations. Films and books are written about him. And talking about art of the twentieth century is unthinkable without mentioning this great and inimitable artist.