Paul Gauguin in Tahiti: why the painter fled to the Pacific

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. He died 54 years later on a remote Pacific island. The route between those two points was not a simple escape. It was a mix of money problems, ambition and a dream that Tahiti could not fully meet.

Why did Paul Gauguin leave Paris?

Gauguin did not start as a full-time painter. He worked as a stockbroker in Paris. In 1873 he married Mette-Sophie Gad, who was Danish, and over the next decade the couple had five children.

Then the Paris stock market collapsed in 1882. After that crash, Gauguin turned to painting full time, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A man with five children and no steady income needs cheap living. That need sits at the center of his story.

You may know the feeling. Many people leave an expensive city when rent climbs and their income does not. Gauguin did the same thing on a much larger scale. In 1901 he moved again, from Tahiti to the Marquesas, partly to get away from rising living costs.

Several things pushed him toward the tropics:

• A trip in 1887. He traveled to Panama and Martinique with the painter Charles Laval. The four-month journey strengthened his wish to work in tropical places.
• A plan with Van Gogh. In 1888, while working with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, he thought about a “Studio of the Tropics”. Artists would live cheaply there and find new subjects that would interest Paris.
• The 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Its colonial pavilions fed his idea of going somewhere not industrialized. There he could make new art and escape his money worries.
• Ambition. The Metropolitan Museum reads his 1891 departure as a wish to leave Paris and also a bid to become the new leader of the Paris avant-garde.

So he did not flee only from debt. He also went toward something. He wanted a new subject and a new reputation.

How do you pronounce Paul Gauguin?

The French pronunciation is /pɔl ɡoɡɛ̃/. In English letters, think of “Pol Gogen”. The vowel in the last syllable is nasal. You say it through the nose, and the final “n” is not fully pronounced.

Timeline

• 7 June 1848: Born in Paris.
• 1873: Married Mette-Sophie Gad.
• 1882: Turned to full-time painting after the Paris stock market crash.
• 1887: Traveled to Panama and Martinique with Charles Laval.
• October 1888: Began working with Vincent van Gogh in Arles.
• 1889: The Paris World’s Fair fed his idea of going somewhere not industrialized.
• 9 June 1891: Reached Papeete on his first Tahiti voyage.
• 1892: Painted Nafea faaipoipo (When Will You Marry?).
• 1893: Returned to France and began work on Noa Noa.
• 1895: Settled in Tahiti again.
• 1897–1898: Painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
• January 1898: Attempted suicide.
• 1901: Moved to Hiva Oa.
• 8 May 1903: Died in Atuona.

Money for the voyage

Gauguin needed capital. According to the chronology of the Berlin state museums, he put 30 of his paintings up for auction in 1891. The sale raised 10,000 francs and helped fund the Tahiti trip.

The French Ministry of Education and Fine Arts also supported him. He left France on 1 April 1891 and reached Papeete on 9 June.

Tahiti was not the paradise he imagined

Here is the irony. Tahiti had become a French colony in 1880. When Gauguin arrived in Papeete in 1891, he was disappointed by the French presence and the spread of Western modernization, as the National Gallery in London notes.

He left Papeete and settled in Mataiea, a village on the island’s south coast. He lived there for more than a year.

Money stayed a problem. He tried to earn a living with portraits for local clients. His 1891 portrait of Suzanne Bambridge did not please the person who ordered it, who kept the painting anyway. The portrait business did not bring the income he expected.

Gauguin’s paintings from Tahiti

You will see his Tahiti paintings in many museums. Here are a few that show how he worked:

• Ia Orana Maria (1891). It rebuilds the Christian theme of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child using Polynesian figures.
• Nafea faaipoipo (1892). The title is usually translated When Will You Marry? It is an oil painting on canvas measuring 105 × 77.5 cm.
• Tahitian Women Bathing (1892). It began as oil studies on paper. They were later glued to canvas, retouched and varnished.

These works do not simply record what Gauguin saw. He mixed his observations with ideas from other sources. That fits his old advice to Van Gogh to paint from memory and imagination.

Gauguin’s self-portrait with a halo

The best-known self-portrait question points to the 1889 Self-Portrait in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Gauguin painted himself with a halo over his head. Apples are beside him, and he holds a snake in his hand. The picture shows a painter who treated his own image as a staged idea, not a mirror.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The famous title is a question, and the painting is huge. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston dates it to 1897–1898. It is oil on canvas and measures 139.1 × 374.6 cm. Boston calls it the largest painting Gauguin ever made.

The museum links the work to a spiritual crisis in the winter of 1897. In that crisis he questioned the meaning of life. Soon after finishing the painting, in January 1898, he attempted suicide.

By then he had returned to Tahiti for good. After going back to France in 1893 because of illness, he began work on Noa Noa with the critic Charles Morice. The book recounts his Tahiti experience. But he did not find the financial success he hoped for in France. In 1895 he went back to Tahiti to settle there.

Gauguin and Van Gogh

Gauguin joined Van Gogh in Arles in October 1888. According to the Metropolitan Museum, he advised Van Gogh to paint from memory and imagination, not by looking straight at nature.

This was also the period when he was thinking about his “Studio of the Tropics”. So the Arles months were not only a meeting of two painters. They were part of the plan that later took him to the Pacific.

The controversy around Gauguin

Gauguin’s reputation is divided, and the debate is not simple.

Colonialism. Some readers see him as an artist who rejected Western society. The Guggenheim’s biography complicates that view. In 1899 he defended the imperialist and colonialist cause of French settlers in the newspaper Les Guêpes.

How his paintings were received. When his Tahiti pictures were shown in Paris in 1893, critics split. Some saw colonial art. Others saw a new modern style that went beyond colonial clichés.

Young women and the Noa Noa story. In the semi-fictional Noa Noa, Gauguin describes a relationship with Tehamana, who is about 13 years old. A 2022 exhibition catalogue says some researchers read this character as a composite of several women and girls.

How did Gauguin die?

Gauguin died on 8 May 1903 in Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa. He was 54. He had moved to the Marquesas in 1901 to find a less colonized place and to get away from rising costs.

The cause of death is uncertain. One claim points to an overdose, because an empty laudanum bottle was found by his bed. The Protestant pastor Paul Vernier saw him in his last days and thought he died of a heart attack.

The syphilis story is also unsettled. A 2016 University of Cape Town report looked at four teeth thought to be Gauguin’s. They did not contain the heavy metals used in syphilis drugs of that time. But a DNA comparison with the teeth was not conclusive either.

Details you won’t find in guidebooks

• The unreadable, writing-like marks in Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Tehamana’s ancestors do not come from Tahiti. They were taken from the rongo-rongo tablets of Easter Island.
• Tahitian Women Bathing began as separate oil studies on paper. Gauguin later mounted them on canvas, retouched them and varnished the whole.
• To pay for the first trip, he sold 30 of his own paintings at auction. They brought in 10,000 francs.
• His disappointment began quickly. In 1891 he found Papeete full of French presence and Western modern life, and he moved out to Mataiea.
• His self-portrait with a halo, apples and a snake is dated 1889. That is before he ever set foot in Tahiti.

FAQ

Sources

1. Wikipedia — Paul Gauguin en.wikipedia.org
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) metmuseum.org
3. National Gallery, London — A new chapter nationalgallery.org.uk
4. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — Gauguin exhibition chronology smb.museum
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Tahitian Women Bathing metmuseum.org
6. Guggenheim — Paul Gauguin guggenheim.org
7. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Where Do We Come From? collections.mfa.org
8. National Gallery of Art — Self-Portrait nga.gov
9. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — A Double History of Gauguin and the Myth of Tahiti smb.museum
10. University of Cape Town — Mystery tooth linked to Paul Gauguin news.uct.ac.za

Image: Paul Gauguin – Fatata te Miti (By the Sea) – Google Art Project.jpg — Paul Gauguin, Public domain