Paul Gauguin Paintings For Sale
Who was Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin?
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a famous Post-Impressionist painter who lived from June 7, 1848, to May 8, 1903. His strong color experiments set the way for the Synthetic style of modern art, while his portrayal of the inherent significance of the subjects in his paintings, influenced by the Cloisonnist style, paved the way for Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also a strong supporter of the art forms of wood engraving and woodcuts.
Paul Gauguin was the son of journalist Clovis Gauguin and half-Peruvian Aline Maria Chazal, daughter of proto-socialist politician Flora Tristan, and was born in Paris, France. The family left Paris for Peru in 1851, spurred on by the political situation of the time. Clovis perished during the journey, leaving Paul, his mother, and his sister to fend for themselves. They resided with Paul's uncle and his family in Lima, Peru for four years. Paul's art would subsequently be influenced by Peruvian iconography.
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Paul Gauguin Famous Paintings
Four Breton Girls
Unlike other artists who painted rural French scenes in the 1880s, Gauguin decided to show four Breton girls in a field in a way that was neither plain documentary nor realistic. Much of the scenery in this painting indicates Gauguin's Impressionist heritage and the associated ideal of capturing a landscape's visual dalliance on the artist's eye, or retina.
Gauguin, on the other hand, uses that recent heritage to new ends, placing the girls in a dance-like formation, emphasizing the massive flow of their dresses, creating profiles and backdrops of portraits and figures that suggest paper dolls...these and other artful manipulations of the subject started to serve a symbolic purpose, implying that deeper meanings are hidden behind the simplistic appearances of reality.
Gauguin combines elements of visual accuracy with design and composition distortions that speak of the girls' mystical union with nature in this "synthetic" work; indeed, they collectively assume the creation of a grove of botanical specimens, a vibrant school of fishes, or a flock of birds in an unobserved, overhead canopy. Faces, figures, attire, and scenery all have equal weight in this democratic realm, where girls interlock their limbs as naturally as if they were born that way.
Vision After the Sermon (Jacob's Fight with the Angel)
The subject matter of Impressionism, mainly the city or rural environment, was still quite popular in Europe and the United States during the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, but Vision after the Sermon indicates a substantial divergence. Gauguin drew a rural Biblical scene of praying women seeing Jacob struggling with an angel, rather than painting pastoral landscapes or metropolitan entertainments.
The choice to paint a religious topic was reminiscent of the Renaissance, but Gauguin rendered his subject in a markedly modern style influenced by Japanese prints, his studies in ceramics, stained-glass window techniques, and other popular and "high art" customs, ultimately highlighting bold outlines and flat color areas.
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The Yellow Christ
Cloisonnism (a style distinguished by dark outlines and bright patches of color separated by forceful outlines) and Symbolism are both evident in The Yellow Christ.
The crucified Christ is seen in the picture, but Gauguin sets the scene in the north of France during the peak time of Autumn foliage, with ladies dressed in 19th-century clothing gathered at the foot of the cross. It is up to the observer to judge whether the vision is brought up in the minds of the faithful or manifested physically in the modern world.
Still-Life with Fruit and Lemons
This still-life demonstrates Gauguin's innate technical proficiency with brush and canvas although he was still working full-time as a stockbroker and painting was hardly more than a hobby to him. The subject matter is likewise typical Impressionist fare, and it's apparent that Gauguin was influenced by Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir early on.
Gauguin's representation of the tablecloth, in particular, bears a significant resemblance to CĂ©zanne's own still lifes, which utilized similar outline and shading elements.
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Self-Portrait 'Les Miserables'
Gauguin and the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh gave each other examples of their work, including a series of self-portraits, just before Gauguin's departure for Arles in late 1888. Gauguin's composition was included in the exchanges. Gauguin included a full-profile likeness of Jean Valjean, the morally upright but continually socially maligned hero of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, in this painting (1862).
Gauguin, with his sad expression, unkempt hair, and sleepy eyes, is attempting to create a link between himself and Valjean, whose prior petty crime (stealing a loaf of bread) forever marks him as a criminal, regardless of his subsequent virtues. Gauguin's very vivid use of color left an indelible impression on Van Gogh later in life.
Two Tahitian Women
As his time in Tahiti drew to a close, Gauguin abandoned his usual Symbolist style to paint portrayals of Tahitian women, whose elegance, form, and lack of shame at their frontal nudity (in stark contrast to many 19th-century European women's attitudes toward the naked body) fascinated, attracted, and inspired him. Gauguin's later work, most of which represented the artist's passionate love of nature, is typified by this double portrait.
Gauguin's painting vision of the islands was, in large part, a romantic one, the place, and its people exoticized, sexualized, and otherwise overstated by a painter in search of a better solution to what he interpreted to be Western society's cultural shortcomings, as learned with the benefit of hindsight.
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Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Gauguin's late-century magnum opus, painted in Tahiti, tells a story in three stages, each corresponding to a concern in the painting's title, which Gauguin penned in the top left corner, notably without question marks. The artist depicts the first stage of life, childhood, on the far right; the second stage, early adulthood; and the final stage, life's coming close, on the far left, where "an old woman approaching death appears pleased and resigned to her thoughts."
Unlike Gauguin's previous attempts, this enormous work, which is based on a long history of "stage-of-life" painting in Western countries, is not outwardly religious but rather personal and enigmatically spiritual. Gauguin's late-life retreat from European society into a culture local to what was then French Polynesia is reflected in this.
Gauguin refers to his own progressively philosophical and spiritual tendencies in his adult years by using such an expressive, yet cryptic title. His contemporaries had always associated him with a Symbolist trend in painting that was strongly tied to French poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, yet he rarely made overt philosophical or literary parallels in his paintings. Gauguin appears to be reflecting on a life lived mostly far from his own geographical and social wellsprings in Where Do We Come From? and maybe seeking mental, spiritual, and physical roots in a world he consciously chose to serve as his "alternative reality."
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Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch)
Manao Tupapau is one of Gauguin's most famous pieces, and it exemplifies how he enjoyed blending the mundane with hints of the spectacular in a single canvas, leaving all ultimate interpretations open to argument. The original scene was sparked by his arriving back late one night and discovering his wife, shown here naked in the tropical heat, shocked by his striking of a match in an all darkness, as he describes in a period diary.
Gauguin portrays the dazzling, surreal appearance of the sub-equatorial interior, which is here embellished with flowery textiles, or batiks, as well as other earthy elements, all of which are suddenly lighted by a chemical flame. At the same time, at the foot of the bed, Gauguin places a ghostly portrayal of a "watching" female spirit, who appears to be harmless, a direct allusion to local mythology telling how such souls roam the night and forever share the life of the living. This picture also exemplifies how Gauguin remained a child of the nineteenth century while simultaneously serving as a bellwether, or beacon, for a younger generation.
A reflection of his Impressionist beginnings, the majority of his art stayed rooted in the physical world around him. Gauguin does, however, occasionally refer to the work of a previous master, like in this painting, which, in many eyes, continues Édouard Manet's Olympia's tradition of the ordinary, un-idealized nude (1863). Yet, like his even more Symbolist compatriots Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau (both of whom were more closely aligned with French Symbolist poetry of the day than Gauguin), Gauguin's work eventually suggests that beneath the entire globe of "rock-solid" outward appearance lies a parallel realm of perpetual mystery, spiritual import, and poetic suggestion.
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Day Of God
Many of Gauguin's most well-known works are paintings that are directly and symbolically influenced by Tahiti's culture, rituals, and people. There are three horizontal stripes in this picture. The top is occupied by an idol of the Tahitian goddess of fertility Hina, who is the subject of several rites.
Three people are arranged in the center on a field of pink earth, possibly signifying the cycle of birth, life, and death. In a post-impressionistic style, the bottom half comprises of bright and clashing hues reflected in the water.
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When Do You Plan To Marry?
Several paintings by Paul Gauguin depict native ladies of Tahiti clothed in traditional Tahitian garb as well as western garb. They are among his most well-known pieces of art.
This painting displays a traditionally clothed woman with a woman in high necked western clothing behind her. The white tiare flower on the ear of the traditionally dressed woman indicates that she is looking for a husband, therefore the title. When Will You Marry? was sold privately by Rudolf Staechelin's family to Sheikha Al Mayassa for close to $300 million (ÂŁ197 million) in February 2015. Even after accounting for inflation, this remains the highest sum ever paid for a work of art as of April 2016.
