Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist, whose work deeply influenced the French avant-garde and modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. As a descendant of the Peruvian nobility, he spent his early childhood in Lima, Peru. This nomadic upbringing aroused his curiosity for exotic lands and cultures, which would eventually lead him to Tahiti and Martinique.

Gauguin discovered art relatively late in life. He was married and working in Paris as a stockbroker when he befriended painter, Camille Pissarro. By 1879 Paul Gaugin was Pissarro’s unofficial pupil and patron, and after the stock market crashed in 1882, Gauguin decided to become an artist full-time.

His early paintings were mainly Impressionist landscapes influenced by Pissarro and Paul Cezanne, who he met through Pissarro. Over the following years, he traveled between Brittany and Paris and became affiliated with the Symbolist movement.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin left France to travel to the island of Tahiti, which he imagined as a ‘primitive paradise’ free from the constraints of modern society. Paintings such as The Seed of the Areoi (1892) and The Moon and the Earth (1893) represented the artist’s interpretations of ancient Polynesian myths.

In 1893, Gauguin returned to France where he found little success and struggled financially. In 1895, he moved permanently to Tahiti. There, he continued to struggle with illness and poverty. In 1901, he moved to the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa, where he died two years later, on March 8, 1903. Paul Gauguin was largely unappreciated during his lifetime, and only after his death, he received recognition for his experimental use of color and innovative Synethetist style. Source: WikiArt.