Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7,1848, into a liberal middle-class family. After an adventurous early life, including a four-year stay in Peru with his family and a stint in the French merchant marine, he became a successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a comfortable bourgeois existence with his wife and five children.
In 1874, after meeting the artist Camille Pissarro and viewing the first Impressionist exhibition, he became a collector and amateur painter. He exhibited with the Impressionists in 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. In 1883 he gave up his secure existence to devote himself to painting; his wife and children, without adequate subsistence, were forced to return to her family. From 1886 to 1891 Gauguin lived mainly in rural Brittany (except for a trip to Panama and Martinique from 1887 to 1888), where he was the centre of a small group of experimental painters known as the School of Pont-Aven. Under the influence of the painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin turned......
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