Paul Gauguin is a traveling lover. After a childhood in Peru and a world tour in the merchant navy, he started to paint. Inspired by what he saw, those he met, fascinated by pre-Columbian civilizations and accompanied by his mentor and friend Camille Pissarro, he exhibited for the first time in 1876. His compositions are marked by experimentation and complex symbolism. His works, and in particular those of his first Tahitian period, depict an unknown world, opaque and incomprehensible to the French viewer of the time, who had no mastery of the traditions and culture of the peoples of Oceania.

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"You know that I have an Indian, Inca birth background and everything I have done is affected by it" - Paul Gauguin, 1889.