By the time he was in Tahiti, the Paris stockbroker was already a man remade. In 1891, Paul Gauguin sailed from France promising to return rich, but in Papeete he found instead debt, illness, and a colonial capital that did not match his dream of escape.

His beginning was Paris, 7 June 1848, in the year of revolution. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a liberal journalist who fled France after his newspaper was suppressed, and his mother, Aline Chazal, carried the memory of Peru, where the family lived from 1850 until Paul was six. That Peruvian childhood, with nursemaids and servants, stayed with him all his life.

Back in France, he was educated in Orléans and Paris, then went to sea as a pilot's assistant and later served two years in the French navy. In 1871 he returned to Paris and, through Gustave Arosa, found work at the Paris Bourse. By 1879 he was earning 30,000 francs a year as a stockbroker, and painting in his spare time after visits to galleries and exhibitions.

The decisive friendship was with Camille Pissarro, who taught him by example rather than academy rules. Gauguin married the Danish woman Mette-Sophie Gad in 1873, had five children, and tried business again in Copenhagen in 1884, selling tarpaulins in a language he could not speak. The failure of that life, and the crash of 1882, drove him towards art full-time.

In the 1880s he exhibited with the Impressionists, but Brittany, Martinique, and Pont-Aven pushed him beyond them. With Émile Bernard and Charles Laval, and under the eye of Edgar Degas, he began using bolder colour, flatter forms, and subjects drawn from native life. His 1889 work The Yellow Christ and the Pont-Aven circle announced a style that would later be called Cloisonnism and Synthetism.

Then came Arles in 1888, where he spent nine turbulent weeks with Vincent van Gogh at the Yellow House. On 23 December, after Van Gogh confronted him with a straight razor, Van Gogh cut off his own left ear. Gauguin left at once, never saw him again, and the friendship became one of the darkest legends of modern art.

He escaped first to Tahiti in 1891, then to the Marquesas Islands in 1901, chasing what he called a more primitive society. In Tahiti he painted Vahine no te tiare, Te aa no areois, and, in 1897, the vast Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which he treated as his final testament after the death of his daughter Aline and crippling debts.

His last years were harsh, but productive. He wrote Noa Noa, fought Bishop Martin and the colonial authorities, and built the Maison du Jouir in Atuona on Hiva Oa. On 27 March 1903 he was fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months in prison for libelling a gendarme, but on the morning of 8 May 1903 he was found dead at 11 o'clock, and buried next day in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery, Atuona.

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