In 1882 the artist Paul Gaugin resigned his position as a Paris Stockbroker. He had been very successful at it and was a very prosperous man. He wanted to be a full time painter.  So, he split away from his family and spent the rest of his life travelling the world and making his dream come true.

First of all he went to Brittany and then on to Martinique and Panama, then to Arles in the south eastern part of France, where he stayed with Vincent Van Gogh.  He was looking for what he called the ‘natural life’. He also made two trips to the South Pacific which really fired his imagination and he used Polynesians and the islands for some of his finest paintings.

Unfortunately his canvases did not sell during his life time and his money soon ran out. On New Year’s Eve 1897, starving, penniless and ill, Gaugin went into the Tahiti jungle and swallowed a large dose of arsenic. However, his suicide attempt failed and after a short sleep, Gaugin managed to drag himself back to the coast.

He stayed in the South Seas and was constantly in trouble with the civil and religious authorities because of his somewhat bohemian lifestyle and his siding with the natives on cultural and religious matters. During his last years he was always ill and poor and on his death in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, the island’s bishop declared that ‘the only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual, a reputed artist but an enemy of God and everything that is decent!’

In 1980 one of Gaugin’s oil paintings, ‘The Guitar Player’ painted in Tahiti in 1892, was sold at Sotheby’s in London for £380,000.