(Eugène-Henri-Paul) Gauguin (b. June 7, 1848, Paris, Fr. – d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Post-impressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through color.

Gauguin, in what we now might call a “mid-life crisis”, left his career and family to pursue painting, traveling as far as Tahiti to “find himself”. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Inspired this tropical environment, Gauguin moved away from Impressionism (and the style of his mentor, Pissarro) and became known for using flat forms and wild color. His best known works all came from this later period. His masterpieces include the early

• Vision After the Sermon (1888) and

and the later works:

• Tahitian Women, (1891)
• Nevermore, (1897)
• Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).