The Post-Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled and restlessly itinerant life; he came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he produced paintings loosely based on Polynesian tradition that heralded the emergence of primitivism and would exert a profound influence on modernist artists from Picasso and Matisse to Jackson Pollock. In this illustrated life of Gauguin, Nicholas Thomas retells the artist’s story for a twenty-first-century audience, giving greater consideration to the Pacific contexts of his experience, and to Pacific perspectives on his art and his legacy.