Paul Gauguin, the son of a journalist and a Peruvian mother, began his career, not as a painter, but as a sailor for the French merchant fleet. He, later, turned to banking and became a stockbroker at the Paris stock exchange.

His painting career started as a hobby. He saw an exhibition of Impressionists and a passion for art developed. With his good income as a stockbroker, he was able to buy several impressionist paintings including those of Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir, although his own art was restricted to weekends.

In 1883, at the age of 35, Paul Gauguin gave up his bourgeois life as a married with five children, stockbroker, and moved from Paris to Rouen to become a painter and printmaker.

By 1888, Gauguin's paintings had a distinct style, using bold, unrealistic colors, large flat areas of color and unrealistic colors, developed from Impressionism through a brief cloisonnist phase towards a highly personal brand of Symbolism, which sought within the tradition of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to combine and contrast an idealized vision of primitive Polynesian culture with the pessimism of an educated European. Most art historian now refer to this as Post-Impressionism.

Gauguin's unconventional working methods such as using unprimed, heavy sacklike canvases, exploiting their abillity to produce dull, flat surfaces and then using those textures to read through a thin layers of paint and then painting with stiff color, sometimes as scumbles and somtimes with a palette knife or mixing the paint with wax to stiffen and make it dull, all led to his avant-garde-ness. He also experimented with media such as wood carving, ceramics, and lithography, and those experiments also influenced his mature style.

He was a painter who danced to a diferent drum. He took constant criticism as a compliment and the fact that he was not trained as many of his other peers, was the very thing that set him apart from other artists. He did not fear the unknown and was willing to risk everything to paint the world in the manner he saw it.

Paul Gauguin's self-conscious, outspoken personality and an aggressively asserted position as the leader of the Pont-Aven group made Gauguin a dominant figure in Parisian intellectual circles in the late 1880s and very influential to early avant-garde artists of the twentieth century.