A French artist influenced by ukiyo-e, Buddhist art, and Romanesque sculpture. By means of clear-cut contours and flatly divided colors, Gauguin blended richly implicative images with ornamentation and is known as a representative artist of Symbolism and Synthetism in France at the end of the nineteenth century. In his later years, he left Europe for Tahiti and created works acutely questioning the significance of the human existence.