Gauguin left the Paris Bourse for Tahiti's saturated color
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, 7 June 1848 to 8 May 1903, quit a booming stockbroker career after the 1882 crash and remade Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painting with Breton, Martinican, and Tahitian subjects. Dealer Ambroise Vollard later sold Europe on the vivid Synthetist color he chased in the South Pacific.
Radical politics ran in the family. His father Clovis, a liberal journalist, fled France when his paper was suppressed, and his grandmother Flora Tristan was a socialist writer whose husband, the engraver André Chazal, went to prison for shooting her. In 1850 Clovis took the family to Peru to seek help from Aline's relatives but died of a heart attack on the voyage. His widow arrived with 18-month-old Paul and was taken in by a granduncle whose son-in-law soon became president of Peru. Paul grew up among nursemaids and servants until the family's patrons fell from power in 1854 and Aline returned to France to work as a dressmaker.
After boarding school and a naval preparatory college, Gauguin served in the merchant marine and then the navy; he learned of his mother's death in 1867 months late, from a letter that reached him in India. In 1871 the family friend Gustave Arosa found him a post at the Paris Bourse. By 1879 he earned 30,000 francs a year as a broker and as much again from art dealing, painting in his spare time and joining Camille Pissarro on Sundays in his garden.
He married the Dane Mette-Sophie Gad in 1873, and they had five children. The 1882 crash gutted his income, and a move to Copenhagen failed when he tried to sell French tarpaulins without speaking Danish; Mette supported the family by teaching French to trainee diplomats. Asked to leave in 1885, he returned to Paris to paint full time and last saw his family in 1891. Brittany, Martinique and finally Tahiti and the Marquesas shaped the bold colour and Synthetist style that made his reputation after his death in 1903, largely through exhibitions arranged with Ambroise Vollard.
Source: Paul Gauguin
