Description
Gauguin was born in Paris, but his family moved to Peru when he was a young child. His journalist father died on the trip to South America. Finally returning to France, Gauguin took to the seas in a merchant navy. He was also in the French Navy for a time, later working as a stockbroker. When Gauguin discovered the Impressionist movement, it ignited his desire to become a painter. He became the proverbial starving artist who pursued his own style of "synthetism", which became a post-impressionist style of modern art, depicting nature through massive simplified forms, large bright planes of color and primitive subject matter. . In fact, Gauguin's art has all the appearance of escaping from civilization, and it was in Tahiti that he discovered the flat forms, the vibrant colors as shown in this painting, The Thatched Hut Under the Palm Trees. Under this natural environment, the untamed nature of primitive art was most enthusiastically committed to the canvas.