Works by Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin, a Paris stockbroker turned painter, reduced his pictures to flat fields of colour inside dark outlines in Brittany, then sailed for Tahiti and later the Marquesas, where he died in 1903.

He began painting in his spare time in 1873, while working as a stockbroker in Paris, and on Sundays he painted in Camille Pissarro's garden. The crash of 1882 cut his income, and from 1886 he worked at Pont-Aven in Brittany. There, drawing on Japanese prints, folk art and Émile Bernard, he turned to pure colour held in heavy outlines. In The Green Christ of 1889 a woman rests at the foot of a green stone group holding the dead Christ, with pink dunes and the sea behind.

Late in 1888 he spent nine weeks painting beside Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Arlésiennes (Mistral) comes from that stay: women in dark shawls cross a public garden past two orange cones, and a face is hidden in the bush at lower left.

He sailed for Tahiti in 1891 to escape European civilisation, though he packed photographs, drawings and prints. In Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), painted there in 1892, a woman is about to plunge into green water beyond a dark trunk lying across pink and violet sand. After his return from Tahiti he cut the Noa Noa woodcuts, gouging his blocks like carvings before adding detail with finer tools. Prints and paintings come in about equal measure below, most from the 1890s. He spent his last years at Atuona on Hiva Oa, where he painted Landscape with a Pig and a Horse in 1903, the year he died.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Finnish National Gallery, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art.