Gauguin was one of the key participants during the last decades of the 19 th century in a European cultural movement that has since come to be referred to as Primitivism.Seeking the kind of direct relationship to the natural world that he witnessed in various communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures, Gauguin treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on the ultimate meaning of human existence, as well as the possibility of religious fulfillment and answers on how to live closer to nature.This background contributed to Gauguin's gradual development of a new kind of 'synthetic' painting, one that functions as a symbolic, rather than a merely documentary, or mirror-like, reflection of reality. After mastering Impressionist methods for depicting the optical experience of nature, Gauguin studied religious communities in rural Brittany and various landscapes in the Caribbean, while also educating himself in the latest French ideas on the subject of painting and color theory (the latter much influenced by recent scientific study into the various, unstable processes of visual perception).Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the 'Other,' has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called 'primitive' arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western society. As the Impressionist movement was culminating in the late 1880s, Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. Paul Gauguin is one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but who broke away from its fascination with the everyday world to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism.

Good Day, Mr. Gauguin by Michael Pierre