Charles Laval

In 1887 two French painters sailed for Panama with a plan that sounds like a fantasy: to live cheaply off the land and paint like free men far from Paris. One was Paul Gauguin. The other was Charles Laval, his younger friend from the artists' colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany, where the two had met the summer before. The scheme fell apart almost at once. There was no easy living to be had, so Laval kept them both afloat by painting portraits of the locals, and after a bout of illness the pair moved on to the Caribbean island of Martinique.

There, under bright heavy light, Laval made a small run of landscapes glowing with hot colour. For decades some of them hung under Gauguin's name, taken for the work of the more famous man, before scholars sorted them out and gave them back to Laval.

He had trained the ordinary way, in the studio of the academic painter Léon Bonnat, and showed at the Paris Salon at 18. He was engaged to the sister of Émile Bernard, another Pont-Aven companion. Laval died of tuberculosis in 1894, only 32 years old, and today several of his Martinique canvases hang in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.