In his infancy, he lived in Lima, Peru. After returning to France, he served in the navy between 1865 and 1871. He worked as a stockbroker and, at the same time, began to paint as an amateur. Between 1880 and 1886, he participated in shows by the impressionist group, having decided to dedicate himself exclusively to painting. He thus entered a period of financial and family problems that led him to seek an alternative to the tough reality of the modern metropolis. First, he went to study in the fields of Brittany. Later, he spent a season with Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) in Provence, where a dramatic episode occurred between the two artists, ending their friendship. From 1895 until his death, he lived in Tahiti, painting the everyday life of this island and using its landscapes as a backdrop for his creations. His style was not an escape toward the exotic, but rather a conscious search for alternative formal values, different from Western art, which he sought for in countless sources and re-elaborated with great compositional skill. This is the case of Poor Fisherman, in which a nude subject is leaning on a canoe while drinking from a gourd and observing the sea and the dark clouds. The pose could derive from an Egyptian relief at Abydos Temple, of which he had a photograph in his private collection.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015
By Luciano Migliaccio
A similar composition is found in Te Vaa (The Canoe) (St. Petersburg, Hermitage) signed and dated 1896. Wildenstein identified the painting Poor Fisherman in the Masp Collection as being one of nine canvases Gauguin sent to art dealer Vollard, which he mentioned in a letter of December 9th, 1896: “a seascape showing the shore and a fisherman drinking next to his boat.” Kostenevitch noted that the letter could also refer to the painting at the Hermitage. However, this latter features two more figures, the fisherman’s wife and child. Here Gauguin’s model was Pauvre Pêcheur by Puvis de Chavannes (1881, Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Camesasca (1989, p. 184) remarked that Puvis isolateds his figures whereas Gauguin brings them together by means of a tense compositional system. Bodelsen manifested reservations about the painting in the Masp Collection as well as another twenty-nine which Wildenstein had declared authentic, because he did not have the opportunity to verify them in person. Although this episode prompted a few scholars to exclude the canvas from Gauguin’s catalogue, in fact there are no serious reasons to justify maintaining these reservations. Gauguin himself produced two woodcuts based on this composition (Guérin, n. 45 and n. 46) and included a retouched watercolor copy in the manuscript of Noa-Noa (p. 73), featuring the artist’s recollections of his first sojourn in Tahiti.
Like the poverty of Puvis’s fisherman, the poverty of the Tahitian fisherman refers to the Biblical destitution of the apostles and first Christians. The picture was painted in the same time period that “Te Tamuri no Atua” (Birth of the Son of God, Munich, Neue Pinakothek). To Camesasca (1989, p. 187) the fisherman’s figure seems to have been inspired by an Egyptian relief depicting Pharaoh Seti I at a temple dedicated to him in Abydos.
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
