Paul Gauguin

Little is known of Gauguin's early life except that he was born in Paris in 1848 and was taken to Peru as an infant because his father feared the political turn of events in France. His father died on that journey, and his mother continued on with Paul and his sister to Lima. Four years later they returned to Paris and settled in OrlTans. He had an early association with strange cultures which may account for his life-long attraction to the exotic. He claimed to have savage Peruvian ancestry, but this was mere pretension on his part. He spent some years in the naval service, but little is known about these years. However, his sea voyages set a pattern for roving adventure his whole life (Nicholls 5).

Gauguin's early artistic tastes were guided and informed by Gustave Arosa, a

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om the post-Impressionistic ideas of Manet and Degas, including the flat simplicity of the Japanese print and a technique developed by Louis AnquTtin known as "cloisonnism," which had been inspired by stained glass. Gauguin visited Brittany, Paris, Arles, and other European locations. He was searching for something he could not find in his normal locale. It was when he read the romantic novel of Tahiti by Pierre Loti that his mind was made up, and he then organized a sale of his paintings to raise enough money to travel to that part of the world (Nicholls 12). Gauguin was not the only painter influenced by the Japanese at this time. Vincent van Gogh moved to Antwerp in 1885 and studied for some months at the Academy there, but he was too much an individualist to work well in the academic environment and so moved to Paris. There he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. His painting at this time underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts (Chilvers, Osborne, and Farr 209). There are no specific references to the aesthetics of japanese prints in Gauguin's early works. The prints became known to the West around the middle of the nineteenth centu
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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