Paul Gauguin Art Prints: A Collector's Guide to Post-Impressionist Colour

Artist Spotlight · 8 min read · Kuriosis Studio Team, Berlin · June 2026

Paul Gauguin gave up a successful stockbroker's career, left his family in Denmark, and eventually sailed to the other side of the world — all in pursuit of a painting practice he believed European civilisation was incapable of producing. The result is one of the most distinctive bodies of work in art history: flat colour fields, bold black contours, tropical light, and an emotional directness that bypasses everything academic painting spent four centuries perfecting.

From Stockbroker to Painter — Gauguin's Radical Life

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. His mother was of mixed French and Peruvian descent; his childhood included five years in Lima, Peru, an early cosmopolitan formation that foreshadowed his lifelong restlessness. Back in France, he served in the merchant marine for six years before settling in Paris as a stockbroker in the 1870s, where he was earning a comfortable income and collecting Impressionist work as a hobby. He painted on weekends and exhibited with the Impressionists between 1880 and 1886, still employed full-time. His guardian Gustave Arosa, an art collector, had introduced him to Pissarro's circle — Gauguin stepped quietly into the most radical painting movement of his day while working a day job.

The 1882 French stock market crash ended his financial career. By 1885, Gauguin had committed entirely to painting, a decision that cost him his marriage. His wife Mette-Sophie took their five children to Copenhagen; he never lived with them again. The following fifteen years moved through Brittany, Martinique, and Arles — including nine weeks working alongside Vincent van Gogh, ending with van Gogh's breakdown. In April 1891, he sailed to Tahiti for the first time. He returned briefly to France, found his new work poorly received, and left again permanently in 1895. He died in the Marquesas Islands on 8 May 1903, aged 54, of complications from syphilis, largely unknown to the broader public.

The biography matters because it shaped the work. Gauguin was not theorising from a comfortable studio — he was dismantling his life, deliberately and at real cost, to make paintings he believed no other approach could produce.

Synthetism and Cloisonnism — A New Visual Language

By the late 1880s, working in Brittany alongside Émile Bernard and the Pont-Aven circle, Gauguin had developed what he called Synthetism: a method of painting that synthesised the outer form of a subject with the inner idea or emotion it carried. As he articulated it: "Art is an abstraction. Extract from nature while dreaming before it, and think more about the act of creation than about the result."

The technical realisation of Synthetism was Cloisonnism — large, flat areas of pure colour bounded by heavy black contours, named by critic Édouard Dujardin after the compartments in traditional French enamel work. Gauguin drew directly on Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and medieval stained glass, rejecting the tonal gradations and perspectival depth that academic painting had refined over centuries. His Vision after the Sermon (1888, National Gallery of Scotland) — Breton women witnessing Jacob wrestling an angel on a flat red ground — was the first major demonstration of the method fully realised. His The Invocation shows the same formal logic carried into the Tahitian period: figures placed on a radically simplified ground, colour describing feeling rather than observed light.

Art critic Albert Aurier, in the defining contemporary assessment of 1891, described Gauguin's work as "ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and decorative" — a statement the artist himself cited approvingly. The word "decorative" was a compliment: Gauguin treated the picture surface as a unified whole, every element serving the composition.

The Tahiti Years — Painting the World He Needed

Gauguin's stated intention for the Tahiti voyage was direct: "I am leaving in order to have peace, to be rid of the influence of civilisation. I only want to do simple, very simple art." He arrived to find a Tahiti already significantly shaped by French colonial administration and Christian missionary activity — not the primal world he had imagined. He responded by painting the Tahiti he needed rather than the one he found.

The Tahitian paintings, produced across two extended stays (1891–1893 and 1895–1903), are the core of his legacy. Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary, 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) transposes the Madonna and Child into a lush Polynesian landscape — not an ethnographic document but a complete spiritual reimagining. Mata Mua (In Olden Times, 1892) depicts an imagined pre-colonial Tahiti in deep, saturated greens and terracottas. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), his self-described masterpiece, was painted in a single month after a failed suicide attempt: a large frieze read right-to-left as birth, life, and death.

The dealer Ambroise Vollard provided Gauguin a monthly advance against guaranteed annual purchases, establishing the commercial infrastructure for his posthumous market. The writer W. Somerset Maugham fictionalised his life in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), dramatically expanding his popular cultural presence throughout the 20th century. His direct influence on subsequent painting is unusually broad: the Nabis group — Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis — formed around his ideas while he was still in Tahiti. Matisse and the Fauves adopted his saturated, non-descriptive colour. Kirchner and the German Expressionists drew on his emotional directness. Picasso credited his engagement with Oceanic form as a pathway into the thinking that led to Cubism.

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What Makes Gauguin Worth Collecting

Gauguin's work holds a rare combination of qualities that drive lasting collector and interior appeal simultaneously.

"Art is an abstraction. Extract from nature while dreaming before it, and think more about the act of creation than about the result."
— Paul Gauguin

Choosing the Right Gauguin for Your Home

Gauguin's work divides naturally into two phases — Brittany and Tahiti — and each creates a distinct atmosphere. The Tahitian canvases bring colour as a physical presence: if you want a painting that commands a room, these are the ones. Mata Mua works above a sideboard or dining table where the warm tropical palette reads from across the room. The Swineherd, from his Brittany period but already showing the bold Cloisonnist palette, sits well in a study or bedroom.

The Brittany works — Haystacks in Brittany, A Farm in Brittany — are more restrained. The palette is cooler and more contained; they sit comfortably in hallways or reading rooms without dominating. They pair naturally with other European landscapes and work well grouped in twos or threes for a narrative sequence from the same period.

For format, canvas is a strong choice for the Tahitian subjects: the cotton weave adds depth to the layered colour fields and echoes the original painting surface. The Brittany works in fine art paper with black or oak framing give a clean, graphic presentation suited to contemporary interiors. Both formats are produced in our Berlin studio on materials built to last well beyond a lifetime.

More works from the Gauguin collection:

Why Fine Art Prints? The Kuriosis Approach

Every Gauguin print in our collection is produced in our Berlin studio using archival pigment inks rated for over 100 years — on 225g fine art paper or 400g cotton canvas. Gauguin's flat colour planes and bold outlines reproduce with exceptional fidelity; the formal qualities he worked hardest to achieve are exactly the ones that translate most cleanly into print. Explore the full Gauguin collection here.

Sources & Further Reading

• Wikipedia — Paul Gauguin — Comprehensive biography, technique, career arc, and Tahiti period
• The Art Story — Paul Gauguin: Paintings, Bio, Ideas — Synthetism and Cloisonnism analysis, Gauguin quotes, Vollard context
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) — Institutional biography and collection holdings including Ia Orana Maria
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Paul Gauguin — Biography, Synthetism definition, influence on Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism
• Tate — Paul Gauguin 1848–1903 — Style overview and institutional artist profile

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