June 7 Birthday of the Day: Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was born in France on June 7, 1848 to parents of Spanish descent, and became one of the leading Post-Impressionist painters of his day.



As his Wikipedia entry says: His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. Though less well known today, he was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. He was friends with Pisarro, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. In 1891, Gauguin sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." He remained in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands for most of the rest of his life. His works of that period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of the inhabitants of Polynesia. He died in 1903.