While Charles Strickland is a fictional character, Maugham based a great deal of his story on the life and work of Paul Gauguin. A closer look at Gauguin's biography reveals a number of striking similarities and gives greater insight into the novel as a whole. Born on June 7, 1848, Paul Gauguin was a French artist with radical and exploratory visual style. The son of a journalist, Gauguin grew up in Peru and France. As a teenager, he became part of the merchant marines and traveled the world before eventually returning to Paris. With the assistance of a family friend, Gauguin became a stockbroker and married Mette Sophie Gad. At the same time, he began to develop an interest in painting and visual art.
Under the mentorship of Camille Pissarro, Gauguin began to develop facility as a painter. Pissarro also introduced him to various major figures in the Impressionist movement, including Claude Monet. When the French stock market crashed in 1882, Gauguin lost his job and started to spend his time focused solely on painting. In the ensuing years Gauguin struggled financially, unable to support his family with his art. He also took trips to Martinique, where he began to pursue a style focused on dense chunks of color, contrasting sharply with the aesthetics of the Impressionists of the period. He termed this new phase of his career an attempt to come closer to visual "primitivism."
Following this radical shift, Gauguin tried to perfect a style that was uncluttered with artifice and instead embraced a more "natural" perspective. In the late 1880s, Gauguin completed many of his major pieces, including Old Women of Arles (Mistral) (1888), Vision After the Sermon (1888), and The Yellow Christ (1889). He also began a close and volatile working relationship with Vincent Van Gogh that ended after Van Gogh sliced off his ear in a famous act of self-mutilation.
Seeking refuge from the corruption he perceived in French society, Gauguin began traveling to the country of Tahiti. Here, he painted a great deal and further refined his experimental style. Back home in France, he finally began to receive the critical and popular recognition that he missed for much of his early life. In 1897, he painted what is commonly regarded as his masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a large scale work that reflects the nature of life and mortality in a Tahitian village. During a second trip to Tahiti, he started a new life in the remote island of Hiva Oa, abandoning his life, including his wife and children, in Paris. He died in 1902 after contracting Syphilis.
