Paul Gauguin began to paint late, at 25 years of age, but painting became all his life. For painting he left his wife and children and quit his profitable post of clerk.

Gauguin was full of inner contradictions and complicated in his behaviour. His life was filled with arduous work, militant commitments at the expense of his friends, chimerical dreaming, short-lived happiness, the painful and glorious satisfaction of a man who knows that he has defined his own freedom, that he is animated by a spirit that cannot be taken from him. In quest for different life Gauguin went in 1891 to Tahiti. He spent there his last years, which were both very difficult and very happy. From this period of his life descend artist's most famous works.

Paul Gauguin was the Post-Impressionist, but his simple brushwork and intensely contrastive colours largely retain the Impressionist approach to three-dimensionality through shadow, patches of light and an extensive use of green.