Paul Gauguin

Gauguin left a career in stockbroking, then left his family, then left Europe, and built a body of work out of the going. The Tahitian paintings are the ones that sell reproductions, and they are also the ones now argued over hardest, given what his letters and behaviour there record.

The painting itself broke with Impressionism deliberately. Flat areas of unmodulated colour, heavy outlines, space compressed. He called it synthetism, worked it out at Pont-Aven in Brittany, and pushed it further once he reached the Pacific.

The stay with Van Gogh in Arles lasted nine weeks and ended with the razor and the ear. He spent his final years in the Marquesas, in poor health and in trouble with the colonial authorities. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, painted in 1897, was intended as a summary before an attempted suicide.