Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin( 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading Post-Impressionist artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and writer. His bold experimentation with colouring led directly to the Synthetist  style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism  and the return to the pastoral.