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Until he was in his mid-thirties, Paul Gauguin was a Paris stockbroker with a good salary, a Danish wife, and five children. He collected Impressionist paintings as a rich man's hobby and dabbled at making his own. Then in 1882 the Paris stock exchange crashed, the firm he worked for came apart, and the comfortable life went with it. Gauguin decided the disaster was permission: he would paint full time. His family, appalled, eventually left him.

He drifted to Pont-Aven, a cheap artists' village in Brittany, and there worked out the style that made him. In 1888 he painted a group of Breton women in white bonnets seeing a vision after church, Jacob wrestling an angel on a flat field of pure red. There was no attempt at real space or natural colour; the picture was built from bold outlines and blocks of flat tone, an idea rather than a scene. This way of painting from imagination and symbol, which he called Synthetism, fed straight into modern art.

That autumn Vincent van Gogh coaxed him south to Arles to share a house and start an artists' colony. It lasted nine weeks. The two men painted furiously and argued worse, and just before Christmas 1888 the quarrel ended with van Gogh cutting off part of his own ear and Gauguin fleeing back to Paris. Gauguin wanted somewhere further from Europe altogether, and in 1891 he sailed to Tahiti, a French colony in the Pacific, looking for a paradise he had half-invented in his own head. He found a Papeete already colonised and Catholic, painted some of the most famous canvases of his life there anyway, and died poor on the remoter Marquesas Islands in 1903.