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The Paul Gauguin Museum. Click to see Moorea Pictures.

Paul Gauguin, a French stockbroker, abandoned his wife, six children and Paris life in 1891 to sail to Tahiti and develop his passion for impressionistic painting. As it happened he also developed a passion for lithe and liberated Polynesian girls, painting them vividly and nakedly as well as interacting with them on a more physical plane, outraging French colonial society and ensuring that he would be an outcast on the island.
Gauguin particularly disliked Papeete, the capital [who doesn't?], and lived for two years on Tahiti's south coast. He then made a trip back to Paris, perhaps as a marketing exercise, perhaps because he tired of the tropical life but whatever the reason France didn't work for him second time around either so he returned to Tahiti in 1990. Unfortunately civilisation had arrived in the meantime and the island was way too sophisticated and spoilt for him, so he sailed off to the Marquesas Islands where he died, penniless, in 1993.
Gaugin's paintings are now worth many millions of dollars.

Tahiti's Gauguin Museum is user-friendly with a relaxed and varied collection of copies, artifacts from that era and stories about the G man.

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