Painter. He was a 19th-century French painter. Born Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, his family left France for political reasons, sailing for Peru. In 1851 his father died before the ship's landing, leaving his widowed mother with two young children in a foreign country with an extended family in Lima. The experience of living in Peru would impact his art. Four years later, his mother brought him and his sister back to France. The children did not speak French. First, he was a sailor to fulfill his military obligations, then a stockbroker in Paris but painted in his free time. He began working with Camille Pissarro in 1874, and after having his own studio, shown in many Impressionist exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad, and the couple had five children within ten years. In 1884 he moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he unsuccessfully pursued a business career. He returned to Paris in 1885 to paint full-time, leaving his family in Denmark, who resided with his in-laws for the rest of his life. In 1885 he met Edgar Degas, next year he met Charles Laval and Émilie Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. With Laval, he traveled to Panama and Martinique in 1887 in search of more exotic subject matter to paint. Beginning to paint in bold colors and exaggerated body proportions, he turned to primitive cultures for inspiration. In 1891 he auctioned his paintings to raise money for a voyage to Tahiti, which he undertook that same year, seeking ultimate artistic freedom. Soon after reaching Tahiti, he obtained a thirteen-year-old bride, Teha'amana, through a business arrangement with her family. Two years later, illness forced him to return to Paris but he was able to return to Tahiti in 1895, becoming part of the native community, practicing their culture and becoming at odds with the authorities of the French colony and the Roman Catholic Church. Fighting chronic depression, he unsuccessfully attempted suicide in January of 1898. In 1899 he founded his own periodical, "Le Sourire." In 1901 he moved to the Marquesas, French Polynesia, where he died, according to his biography, of the complications of latent syphilis. Many of his paintings were obtained posthumously by a Russian collector, and in the 21st century, displayed in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museum. His 1899 oil-on-canvas "Two Tahitian Women" is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Although it is rare to have any of his paintings at auction, pieces have sold as high as nearly $40 million US Dollars.