Eugene-Henri-Paul Gauguin was French painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Gauguin's style developed from Impressionism through a brief cloisonnist phase (in partnership with Emile Bernard) 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 skeptical pessimism of an educated European. A self-consciously outspoken personality and an aggressively asserted position as the leader of the Pont-Aven group made him a dominant figure in Parisian intellectual circles in the late 1880s. His use of non-naturalistic color and formal distortion for expressive ends was widely influential on early 20th-century avant-garde artists.
