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8 x 48 cm Art Institute, Chicago 34 35 Gauguin began his career as a grown man. Nothing in his childhood or youth betrayed any hint of his future as an artist. He was born in Paris on 7 June 1848, in the midst of the revolutionary events when barricade fighting was going on in the streets of the city. This fact was to have repercussions for Gauguin’s later life. 2 cm Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, Paris 36 37 It is difficult to say whether Clovis Gauguin played an active role in the events, but it is a fact that following the failure of Marrast (who was a member of General Cavaignac’s government) in the election to the National Assembly, the Gauguins left France.

Some contemporaries reacted to his departure from Europe with mistrust and suspicion, for they believed that a true artist could and must work only on his native soil and not derive inspiration from an alien culture. Pissarro, Cézanne and Renoir shared this opinion, for example. They considered Gauguin’s borrowings from the stylistics of Polynesian culture to be a kind of plunder. Young Bretons at Bath 1886 oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm Museum of Art, Hiroshima 30 31 Such controversial opinions of Gauguin’s art are by no means accidental.

Others, on the contrary, think that Gauguin continued the European artistic tradition. Some contemporaries reacted to his departure from Europe with mistrust and suspicion, for they believed that a true artist could and must work only on his native soil and not derive inspiration from an alien culture. Pissarro, Cézanne and Renoir shared this opinion, for example. They considered Gauguin’s borrowings from the stylistics of Polynesian culture to be a kind of plunder. Young Bretons at Bath 1886 oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm Museum of Art, Hiroshima 30 31 Such controversial opinions of Gauguin’s art are by no means accidental.