Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 - May 9, 1903) was an Impressionist painter. Gauguin's artistic development of a conceptual method of representation was important for the history of art as it moved into the twentieth century. The name for the movement was called by Jean Moreas Symbolism, " as the only name capable of giving a reasonable definition of the present trend of the creative in spirit in art." Its essential character was, "to clothe an idea in a visible form."
          Painters no longer aimed at depicting the outer world but at rendering their inner dreams by symbolic allusion and decorative form. Line and color developed their powers of expression, taking inspiration in global art from Japanese art prints to primitive African art.

         On the subject of line and drawing, Gauguin said in 1879,"One must draw and draw again"
"It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one day you are amazed to discover that you have found the way to render a thing with its own character"
"don't make pretty, clever little lines, but be simple and insist on the major lines that count"
         Gauguin said himself about his drawings that "It always seems to me that something is missing: the color." Though based, to use Gauguin's words, on "sharpness of outline," it is their color that brings Gauguin's best drawings and paintings to life. It is the novel color harmonies, inspired and heightened by his travels to the tropics that give his work a hallucinatory richness that has never been matched. His legacy of expressionistic color and composition inspired the twentieth century and continues to excite contemporary artists of the twenty first.
         Gauguin's father died the year after Gauguin was born and he was raised by his mother in Peru, "that wonderful land where it never rains," Gauguin was destined to travel throughout his lifetime and find inspiration in exotic lands. He joined the merchant navy in 1865, and in 1872 began a successful career as a stockbroker in Paris. In 1873 he married Mette Gad, a pretty Danish society girl and had five children within ten years. Gauguin collected oriental carpets, pottery, Japanese prints, and art by Pissarro, Manet, Sisley, Renoir, Monet, Guillaumin, Daumier and Degas. Pissarro became a friend and painting teacher as Gauguin began to paint himself. He worked with Van Gogh and Degas who bought several of Gauguin's paintings. If his career started late and developed slowly, he had the advantage of entering into immediate contact with the living art of his day.
         In 1883-84 the bank that employed Gauguin got into financial difficulties and Gauguin began to paint every day. His wife and children moved to Denmark and so began his tumultuous years as an artist. He traveled to Denmark, then lived in Rouen, both times attempting to make a viable life with his family and painting. His mind was obsessed with theoretical foundations of his art and painting that proclaimed his personal vision. "The further I go, the more I feel sure that thoughts can be expressed by something quite different from literature," he wrote.
         In 1887 Gauguin leaves for Panama and Martinique, where he paints several landscapes prefiguring his Tahitian pictures. He returns to Paris and Theo Van Gogh organizes Gauguin's first one-man show in Paris. In 1891 he sails for Tahiti and acquires a native hut in the Mataiea district. He has two fruitful years before returning to Europe with ill health. He returns to Tahiti in 1895 and has more fruitful years despite illness and trouble with local authorities. In 1901 Gauguin sought still more distant and freer lands, the Marquesas Islands, where he built a cabin he called the House of Joy on the beautiful island of Dominique. Gauguin died there in 1903.

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