Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ

On this day in 1848 Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia, and most of his paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region.

Painted on the eve of Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti, Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ is a veritable manifesto. In the central figure, Gauguin's piercing stare expresses the burden of his problems (misunderstanding, abandoning by his wife who had gone back to Denmark with their children, troubles with Tahiti trip) as well as his determination to struggle on with his art. In the background, he has brushed in two other works he had painted the previous year, which confront one another from an aesthetic and symbolic point of view.

P.S. You can read more about The Yellow Christ itself here.