French artist Paul Gauguin, whose paintings comprise the TAHITI cards, was born in Paris in 1848. His early adult life was typically domestic, but he left his family to devote himself fully to painting, retreating to Brittany, where he painted his well-known works depicting the peasant milieu. Gauguin’s attempted to collaborate with Van Gogh, but the effort failed, due to irreconcilable perspectives.
Impressionism – capturing images of daily life outdoors, in natural light, rather than in a studio – and work on the historical themes of religion and mythology strongly influenced his early career. Gauguin went further, though, to develop Synthetism, a style of painting which thematically combined impressions of nature with the inner perceptions of the artist. In his art, he attempted to clarify natural laws regarding colouration. He incorporated into his painting the techniques of Pablo Pisarro and Paul Cézanne. Working with both intrinsic and symbolic values of surface, line, and colour, Gauguin became one of the vanguard artists who opened the way for Expressionism and Abstract styles of painting.
As time went by, Gauguin depended less and less on form to express his concepts and increasingly on colour. His art reached a height of colour intensity during his late period on Tahiti. He spent the years from 1891 to 1892 there, then returned to the South Seas later for a further six years of work, fulfilling his dream of having a tropical studio surrounded by the lushness of exotic vegetation and culture.
The last two years of Gauguin’s life were characterised by sickness, poverty, and despair. They were spent in the Marquesas, a group of islands neighbouring Tahiti. He died there in 1903.
The rich and intensely coloured paintings Gauguin created depict nothing of his personal life, which held so much suffering. Instead, his paintings are a declaration of beauty and joyous harmony.
