Paul Gauguin - Biography

Paul Gauguin 1891
Paul Gauguin 1891

Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848 in Paris, the son of French liberal journalist Clovis Gauguin and writer Aline Marie Chazal. (Aline was the daughter of the engraver André Chazal and the socialist women's rights activist Flora Tristan.) The Gauguin family emigrated a year later, but during the voyage Clovis Gauguin died on October 30, 1849 of a heart attack. The widow was taken with her two children, Paul and Marie from her great-uncle Don Pío de Tristán in Peru. In December 1854 returned with her son and daughter back to France. Paul Gauguin visited from 1854 to 1864, a run of clergy boarding school near Orléans. At seventeen he hired as a cabin boy on a French merchant ship. In an Indian port 1867 he learned that his mother had died at the age of forty-one years in Paris. He then drove another four years at sea.

After Paul Gauguin 1871 had taken a job as a stockbroker in the office of Paul Bertin in Paris, his friend Claude-Emile Schuffenecker encouraged him as an artist to try and incidentally to attend the Académie Colarossi. In November 1873 Paul Gauguin married originating from a middle-class family in Copenhagen Danish Mette-Sophie Gad. He learned Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas know and already toyed with the idea to give up his job to devote himself entirely to painting when he lost his job in August 1883. For financial reasons, he left with his wife and those born from 1874 to 1883 five children expensive metropolis. Temporarily they lived in Rouen. In July 1884 Mette went with three children to their relatives to Copenhagen and started to give private lessons in French. Paul Gauguin followed her some time later, but in June 1885 he separated from his family and returned to France, where he temporarily posters stuck to earn some money.

In the summer of 1886, Paul Gauguin painted for the first time in Pont-Aven in Brittany. (To this place he returned several times.) With his self-developed style - the "synthetism", a two-dimensional, intensely colored representation without detailed internal drawing but with accentuated contours as in Cloisonnism - he influenced the artist group "Nabis", the 1888 by Paul Sérusier collected and were among the Émile Bernard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Felix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard and Jan Verkade.
Together with his painter friend Charles Laval Paul Gauguin traveled to Martinique in 1887 and Panama (May - October).
By Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) Paul Gauguin was persuaded end of October to come to Arles in 1888. But instead of working together, the two painters fell out. That is why Paul Gauguin in December decided to leave Arles again. Shortly thereafter, Vincent van Gogh cut off with a razor half of his left ear and from Paul Gauguin was detained by police on suspicion of murder. (Vincent van Gogh spent the rest of his life in sanatoriums. On July 29, 1890, he killed himself on a painful manner with a shot in the stomach.)

The Vision after the Sermon. Jacob wrestling with the Angel 1888
The Vision after the Sermon.
Jacob wrestling with the Angel
1888

In a conscious rejection of Western civilization Paul Gauguin emigrated to Tahiti and came after a two and a half months long voyage on 9 June 1891 in the capital Papeete. After spending some time with an Anglo-Tahitian prostitutes, the thirteen-year-old Teha'amana became his mistress. The Polynesian mythology, the sight of young Polynesian inspired him while dozens of paintings, but his expectation of finding in the South Seas paradise lost, was not fulfilled. Frustrated and destitute traveled Paul Gauguin June 4 bis August 30, 1893 back to France. In Paris he lived with a Annah Martin, who came as a servant to him. She was allegedly seventeen and Javanese, but Paul Gauguin she held for three, four years younger and had doubts about the origin of the mulatto. During a stay with Annah in Pont-Aven Paul Gauguin came on May 25, 1894 in a fight in the street, where he is a comminuted fracture of the right ankle drew upon that made it hard to create it for the rest of his life. Annah returned without him back to Paris and left him.
Of the money that had left him his now deceased uncle Isodore in Orléans, Paul Gauguin bought a boat ticket and went on July 3, 1895 in Marseille again on board a ship bound in the Pacific. On September 8, he was back in Papeete. He asked for Teha'amana, but she was now married to a Polynesian. A fourteen-year-old named Pau'ura was in the spring of 1896 his mistress. At the end of the year Pau'ura released their first child into the world, but it died shortly after birth. Only the son Emile, was released from the Pau'ura on 19 April 1898, lived. Meanwhile, Paul Gauguin lived with his lover in a covered with palm fronds, bamboo hut in Punaauia outside Papeete.
The pain that still caused him the ankle fracture, Paul Gauguin could stand only with morphine and laudanum. In addition, he increasingly suffered from the effects of syphilis disease that he had possibly suffered during his trip to America in 1887. Then chronic eye inflammation was due that made him almost blind gradually. Was alone in the first quarter of 1901 Paul Gauguin three more days in the hospital. His attempt to kill himself with Arsenikpulver failed because he vomited immediately after taking it.

Self Portrait with the Yellow Christ 1890
Self Portrait with the Yellow Christ
1890

In Tahiti Paul Gauguin had not found paradise, but now he dreamed that people have remained in the Marquesas Islands, of the Western civilization unaffected. The emigration to Tahiti Swede Axel Nordman bought him from the hut in Punaauia. Books by Dieter Wunderlich The money was Paul Gauguin for his move to the Marquesas island of Hiva Oa, where he arrived on 16 September 1901. To acquire by Bishop Joseph Martin a piece of land in Atuona and to be able to let it build a hut, he acted as if he was a devout Catholic. At the latest when he moved there with his fourteen-year-old, a cacique abgekauften lover Vaeoho and forty-five pornographic photographs hung up, he had acquired during his second voyage from Europe to Polynesia in Port Said, he made the bishop to the enemy.
Paul Gauguin died suddenly on the morning of 8 May 1903. Earlier, he had sent for his pastor Paul Vernier, complaining of fainting fits. They had chatted together and Vernier had left, believing him in a stable condition. However Gauguin's neighbour Tioka found him dead at 11 o'clock, confirming the fact in the traditional Marquesan way by chewing his head in an attempt to revive him. By his bedside was an empty bottle of laudanum, which has given rise to speculation that he was the victim of an overdose. Vernier believed he died of a heart attack.