Paul Gauguin, Portrait de l'artiste au Christ jaune, 1890X1891

Paris, Musée d'Orsay, RF 1994 2

Image here: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

“How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermillion.” 

So said Paul Gauguin to young Paul Sérusier, while he was painting at the Pont-Aven colony in Brittany.  

And who was Paul Gauguin to be giving such advice? Well not a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, that’s for sure. This latecomer to the Impressionist movement had already travelled far and wide – to Peru with his mother, and around the world as a sailor before becoming a stockbroker. He didn’t pick up a paintbrush until almost the threshold of middle age. What happened after that is the stuff of legend.  

After joining the Impressionists, he founded his own movements of pure colour and feeling – Synthetism and Cloisonnism. But that was not enough. With his hitherto conventional family life in meltdown, he ventured to Tahiti and eventually to one of the remotest islands of French Polynesia. 

His final sojourn was not without its controversies, but it has left us with perhaps the most powerful exploration of pure colour attempted up to that time. Many a colourist came after, but they all owed a debt to Paul Gauguin.

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