Paul Gauguin
Left a stockbroking career and a family for Brittany, Martinique and finally Polynesia.
Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, spent his childhood in Peru, worked as a stockbroker for eleven years and collected Impressionist pictures before deciding, after the 1882 crash, to paint full time. He left his Danish wife and five children, worked at Pont-Aven in Brittany where he developed the flat, outlined, deliberately anti-naturalistic manner he called Synthetism, spent a disastrous nine weeks with Van Gogh at Arles, and sailed for Tahiti in 1891. He died in the Marquesas in 1903. The Polynesian pictures are inseparable from the colonial circumstances in which they were made, and from his relationships with girls who were children.
Very little comes to market and almost everything of significance is documented; the Wildenstein Plattner Institute catalogue is the reference for paintings. The woodcuts and the monotypes and oil transfer drawings from the Tahitian years are of first importance, technically unlike anything else of the period, and are catalogued by Mongan, Kornfeld and Joachim. Ceramics and carved wood are scarce and heavily studied. Forgery and misattribution are serious problems across the drawings, and provenance research is not a formality here.
If you own a work by Paul Gauguin
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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