Paul Gauguin was a famous French Impressionist artist, whose oil paintings have gained him followers in Europe and the rest of the world, retaining their popularity today. Paris-born Paul Gauguin used an unusual and oddly experimental use of colour schemes and techniques, which helped to influence other future styles such as cubism and modern art pre-WWII. Gauguin was really famous in the art technique of engraving too, plus sketching amongst others. Gauguin's oil paintings have generally been classified as post-impressionist and primitivist, the latter of which refers to a simple choice of detail and imagination over accuracy in terms of portraits.

Gauguin, like so many famous artists, regularly suffered with bouts of depression and mental illness throughout his career and constantly went in new directions for his painting as he struggled for satisfaction with his own progression. Many artists rarely find satisfaction and comfort, but spend a lot of time striving for it. Gauguin became unimpressed with traditional and contemporary European art of this era and so started to find interest in other regional art from Africa and Asia. Japanese art was certainly to his taste, as it was with Van Gogh and Claude Monet too.

Gauguin's friendship with extraordinary Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh is well covered online and it's written accounts and they spent a short period together in Arles in an attempt to inspire each other. The instability of each artist's character meant it was always likely to prove a rocky period, but they left on reasonably good ground, each understanding their own issues and accepting them accordingly. Paul Gauguin is known to have dismissed Van Gogh's work in part and failed to appreciate Vincent's talents. Paul Gauguin did however purchase some of Van Gogh's sunflowers series.

Paul Gauguin paintings remain an important and uniquely significant development in the art world of that period which has retained it's role in French art. Impressionism and post-impressionism art movements hold Gauguin in high regard and his desire to choose unusual choices as topics for his oil paintings have ensured his paintings retain interest and desire. Very few artists have matched his character and style in recent years.