Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist painter born in 1848 in Paris. He initially worked as a stockbroker but took up painting in his spare time, becoming influenced by Impressionism. In the 1880s, Gauguin abandoned naturalistic depictions and developed a new symbolic style using thick contours and flat areas of color. He traveled to Tahiti in 1891 and remained there until 1893, painting depictions of the local people and landscape. Gauguin continued developing his unique symbolic style and use of bold color in subsequent paintings before his death in Tahiti in 1903.