Impoverished outsider: Paul Gauguin

Before Paul Gauguin decided to become a painter, he spent his time cruising on the world's oceans and working as an investment banker at the Paris Bourse. He earned quite a lot of money and founded a family with five children. The impressionists, holding his amateur paintings in great esteem, encouraged him to present them in their exhibititions - and that's when his social decline began.

At the age of 35, Gauguin radically changes his entire life by turning his hobby into a career. Culture and nature, mysticism and eroticism, dream and reality are the subjects which he tries to tackle in his paintings. Typical for his style are bold colors, large stretches of color, clear contours and lines and rather simplified designs.

Gauguin flees from civilization, at first to Brittany where he studies traditional costumes and customs, combining a simple lifestyle with Bible stories. In "The Vision of the Sermon" (1888) he tries to depict the supernatural. The women farmers look at Jacob and an angel struggling with each other. But the scene is not real - it rather takes place in their imagination.

In the artist village of Pont-Aven, Gauguin is admired for his post-impressionist works. Following a trip to Panama and Martinique, he reluctantly accepts an invitation from Vincent van Gogh to live with him in an artist community in Arles. However, the trip ends in a disaster. Gauguin feels a higher calling: he himself makes an appearance as Jesus Christ in "Christ on the Mount of Olives" (1889).

Gauguin's next destination is Tahiti where he hopes to find freedom at last. But following an invasion of Europeans, the island hardly proves idyllic. The painter laments the "grotesque imitation of our customs, fashions, vices and ridiculous aspects of cultural life." Nevertheless, Gauguin's paintings, much glorifying idleness, show Tahiti as a paradise.

The Tahitians have lost their original instincts, and yet have stayed as beautiful as works of art, Gauguin notes. His paintings satisfy the needs of Europeans longing for exotic beauty and purity. Although exoticism is in high demand in Europe, and few desire Gauguin's art. He continues to live in poverty. His wife has left him and moved to Denmark with their children.

Impoverished, he returns to France two years later: "wilder than when I left - and yet more knowledgeable." Success continues to elude him, so he returns to Tahiti - fed up with life. Even his suicide attempt fails. He continues to paint. He also writes for satirical magazines confronting the colonial administration and the Catholic Church.

He pulls himself together once again, producing his most monumental work: "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going to?" (1897). It shows the cycle of life - from birth to death, with all the fears and joys between. He finally receives the recognition he has so longed for: the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard offers to support Gauguin financially.

Alcohol, frail health and ongoing disputes with the colonial administration wear down the painter who produces less and less. At the age of 55, he dies on the Marquesas island of La Dominique where he had produced "Barbaric Tales" (1902). Behind the natives squats a European - the Dutch painter Meyer de Haan, whom Gauguin once met in Brittany.

Paul Gauguin himself had always been confident of his ability, but only after his death collectors and museums started to show more interest in his art. Today he is one of the most famous representatives of European painting.