Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) occupies a singular position in the history of modern art, having transformed himself from a Parisian stockbroker and amateur painter into one of the most consequential figures of post-Impressionism. He exhibited alongside the Impressionists before forging a distinct path, developing Synthetism during his years in Brittany — a style defined by simplified, boldly outlined forms and color deployed for expressive and symbolic rather than descriptive ends. The Brittany and Paris paintings of 1889–1891 are regarded as the fullest realization of this Synthetist vision, marking a decisive turn from post-Impressionist color exploration toward complex Symbolist narrative.

Gauguin's extended periods in Tahiti, beginning in 1891, produced the body of work most closely associated with his legacy: figure and landscape paintings in which non-Western environments become the ground for highly subjective color and layered symbolic meaning. These canvases, held today in major European and American museums, have been described as mystical yet anxious renderings of human destiny, and they remain central to his standing in modern art history. His work entered the programs of Galerie Vollard and Galerie Barbazanges in Paris during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a significant solo exhibition of his work was held in Paris in 1906, three years after his death.

Gauguin's œuvre is now represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery and the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery, London, in 2019; Gauguin: The Other and I at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in 2023; and Gauguin's World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2024. Scholarly attention to his work remains active: critical essays in Apollo and Frieze in 2024 and 2025 have engaged directly with questions of his legacy and the ethical dimensions of his time in Polynesia, while the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek undertook a formal re-examination of its own Gauguin holdings in 2021.

Authentication of Gauguin's paintings is governed by the catalogue raisonné tradition initiated by Georges Wildenstein in 1964 and continued by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, whose digital catalogue covering 328 paintings from 1889 to 1903 published its final installment in July 2024. The WPI's Gauguin Committee, led by scholars including Richard Brettell and Sylvie Crussard, determines accepted attribution through examination status recorded for each entry. Graphic works are authenticated by reference to catalogues raisonnés by Fabrizio Agustoni and Elizabeth Mongan.