The 1882 stock market crash cost Gauguin his job. When his patron, Gustave Arosa, died the following year, he lost his safety net. Following the birth of Pola—on whose birth certificate Gauguin identified himself as a painter for the first time—the family moved to Rouen in January 1884.

Gauguin sent paintings to Durand-Ruel; none sold, and Pissarro found them monotonous. Gauguin and Mette argued about money. They sent Emil to Denmark for education funded by Countess Moltke, a wealthy family friend. Mette refused sex, fearing pregnancy. In July, she took Aline and Pola to Denmark, leaving Gauguin in Rouen with their other two sons, Clovis and Jean-René.

Gauguin spent the summer in isolation, producing numerous paintings imitating Cézanne. He filled notebooks with art theory, reading composer Richard Wagner’s philosophy and questioning whether music or painting was the supreme art. He painted Clovis Asleep, where wallpaper becomes the sleeping child’s nightmare landscape.

The family moved to Denmark, where Gauguin tried and failed to sell tarpaulins. Mette’s family mocked him as the “missing link” between apes and humans. When Mette’s tutoring work forced Gauguin to relocate to the attic, he developed suicidal ideation. Nevertheless, he produced 17 paintings, though the five-day exhibition resulted in no sales. It was during this period that he created two particularly gloomy pieces: Self-Portrait at the Easel and a miniature carved coffin-box containing a wooden corpse. When Aline was sent to live with Mette’s sister Pylle, who lived in Oslo, it was a deep humiliation for Gauguin, reminding him that he could not support his favorite child.

In June of 1885, Gauguin returned to Paris with Clovis, leaving Mette in Denmark with Jean-René and Pola. After failed attempts to join artists’ colonies, including rejection by the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche in Dieppe, he took a bill-posting job in extreme poverty. After Clovis contracted smallpox, his immune system weakened by his living circumstances, Gauguin placed him in boarding school.

At the May 1886 Impressionist exhibition, painter Georges Seurat’s pointillist A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, based on color theories by physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and aesthetician Charles Henry, dominated. Gauguin experimented briefly with pointillism but rejected it, instead creating a literary hoax—a treatise by a fictional ancient painter named Mani-Vehbi-Zunbul-Zadi—to promote his own views. Accepted as genuine, it was published. Nevertheless, the exhibition closed with scant sales. Gauguin resolved to find a “wild place” that would allow him to reconnect with himself.

Gauguin borrowed 300 francs and retreated to Brittany to recover his “savage” nature. In Pont-Aven, he stayed at the Pension Gloanec, where he was immediately inspired by the Breton landscape and traditional dress. He found a busy international artists’ colony led by Dutch painter Hubert Vos, a follower of Bastien-Lepage’s Romantic Realism.

Vos challenged Gauguin’s Impressionist manners; Gauguin ignored him, and within weeks, Vos’s circle began imitating Gauguin. His painting The Moulin du Bois d’Amour Bathing Place, classical in structure and modern in execution, created a stir and made him the colony’s leader. A “Gauguin gang” coalesced, including a painter named Charles Laval. Gauguin enjoyed teaching but stayed aloof, confiding only in Mette, to whom he remained faithful throughout this period. To master composition, he filled sketchbooks with figures and animals, especially geese. In three months, he produced 40 paintings and sharpened his theories.

In October 1886, he returned to Paris for a ceramics project proposed by Félix Bracquemond, a key figure in Japonisme. Near ceramicist Ernest Chaplet’s workshop, he quickly moved from decorating to hand-molding, drawing on pre-Columbian forms to create 55 powerful, asymmetrical pieces. However, overwork and malnutrition left him severely ill, and despite Chaplet’s and Bracquemond’s admiration, the pots neither sold nor were exhibited. After a hospital stay for angina, Gauguin abandoned the venture.

Learning that his brother-in-law, Juan Uribe, was in Panama and associated with a project to dig a canal, Gauguin decided to go, convinced that there would be work and a path to reunite the family in the tropics. He arranged power of attorney for Mette and, the day before departure, had a strained farewell with her in which he apologized for his failures, reiterated his love for her, and encouraged her to sell whatever works she liked to support their children. After he left, she emptied his studio.

On April 10, 1887, Gauguin sailed to Panama with Charles Laval. They planned for Gauguin to work with Juan Uribe and then relocate to Taboga. The canal project proved disastrous, with a staggering death toll, and Uribe proved merely to be a shopkeeper who offered no help; Gauguin left in anger, stealing an overcoat.

He found a canal job but was laid off after 15 days amid mass dismissals. On Taboga, he and Laval encountered a mosquito-ridden island dominated by a sanatorium; Gauguin contracted malaria. In June, they sailed to Martinique and settled in a deserted hut near Saint-Pierre. There, Gauguin collapsed with dysentery and malaria, and Laval contracted yellow fever. Gauguin nursed him and once prevented his death by suicide. For six of 19 weeks, Gauguin was bedridden, yet in lucid spells, he filled three sketchbooks and completed 16 paintings. Unable to travel, he painted the female market carriers who passed his hut.

Working from sketchbook figures, he composed in the studio and made decisive advances in subjective color and simplified, decorative form—evident in works like Fruit Porters at Turin Bight. He would later call Martinique a “decisive experience” in which he found his “real self.” No letters arrived from Mette.

In August, word came that a businessman named Albert Dauprat, impressed by Gauguin’s ceramics at Chaplet’s, wanted to finance a partnership. Gauguin urgently requested fare money from Schuffenecker and returned to Paris, leaving the still-ill Laval behind, only to learn upon arriving that the Chaplet deal had collapsed. Angered by Louise Schuffenecker’s disdainful treatment of her husband, he modeled a ceramic portrait pot of her as a disembodied head.

Gauguin learned that a group including Vincent van Gogh, Émile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others was calling itself the Painters of the Petit Boulevard and exploring emotional intensity and spiritual themes in a style that would be dubbed Cloisonnism. Gauguin admired Van Gogh’s work, and Van Gogh and his brother, Theo, who was a leading dealer, visited Gauguin to see his Martinique paintings; Theo bought one for 400 francs, and Vincent proposed an exchange. Gauguin sent 100 francs to Mette.

Theo became his agent, selling 11 paintings and several ceramics over two years. Critics praised the Martinique work, and Gauguin emerged as a new force in Paris. However, his health was still precarious, so in January 1888, he returned to the Pension Gloanec to recover; he felt restored by July and took boxing and fencing lessons to regain strength. In Brittany, he synthesized the region’s spirituality in The Vision of the Sermon, a bold fusion of reality and imagination unified by a solid vermilion ground. He offered the painting to churches in Pont-Aven and Nizon; both priests refused it. On Van Gogh’s and Degas’s advice, Theo sent it to Brussels, where it was mocked. Gauguin withheld it from exhibition until 1891.

From March to September 1888, Van Gogh urged Gauguin to join him in Arles to found an artists’ colony called the Studio of the South. After the priests’ rejection of The Vision of the Sermon, Gauguin agreed; Theo financed the move with 150 francs per month for paintings.

Gauguin and Van Gogh exchanged self-portraits beforehand. Gauguin paints Les Misérables, presenting himself as Jean Valjean; Van Gogh sent a portrait of himself as an ascetic Japanese monk. When Gauguin arrived at the residence Van Gogh was renting, the Yellow House, his appearance with fencing foils alarmed Vincent. Meanwhile, Gauguin was dismayed by the chaos of Van Gogh’s studio and his waste of costly paint. Van Gogh had decorated Gauguin’s room with his new Sunflowers series as a welcome—symbolic “composite portraits” joining Gauguin’s Peruvian heritage (by evoking the Incan sun god) and Van Gogh’s spiritual quest (through the flowers’ Christian symbolism). Gauguin’s mild response disappointed Van Gogh.

They painted together at the Alyscamps, a Roman necropolis, their different visions evident. Finding the house disordered, Gauguin instituted a cash box and cooked; Van Gogh, in letters to Theo, admired Gauguin’s worldly competence and imagination. Their work next tackled nightlife: Gauguin painted a dreamy view of the Night Café with Madame Ginoux, while Van Gogh’s version was raw and jarring.

After 20 days of rain confined them indoors, tensions rose. Van Gogh painted Van Gogh’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair; Gauguin depicted him in The Painter of Sunflowers, registering Van Gogh’s declining mental health. One night, Gauguin awoke to find van Gogh standing over his bed. On December 22, Van Gogh threw a glass of absinthe at Gauguin in a café. The next morning, Gauguin announced that he was leaving. That evening, Van Gogh confronted him on the street with a razor; Gauguin held his ground, and Van Gogh fled. Gauguin spent the night in a hotel. The next morning, police and a crowd surrounded the Yellow House: Van Gogh had severed his ear, delivered it to a maid working at a brothel, and gone home to bed. Police briefly suspected Gauguin, accusing him of killing Van Gogh; however, when he entered the house, he confirmed that Van Gogh had survived.

Gauguin telegraphed Theo, who arrived on Christmas Day. Gauguin recounted recent signs of Van Gogh’s crisis, and the brothers returned to Paris that night. Gauguin and Van Gogh continued corresponding, Van Gogh never blaming Gauguin for what had happened. Gauguin replied with practical advice on stabilizing flaking white paint, taking care to protect Van Gogh’s feelings. Though Gauguin resolved never to see him again, years later in Polynesia, he would plant and paint sunflowers in memory of his friend.