The Joys of Fieldwork?

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The image here is called Delectable Waters and is by the French painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Gauguin received a prestigious education and became an naval officer for several years. However, he soon returned to Paris where he worked as a stockbroker. He made enough to make him very prosperous and at the same time took up painting and started to hang around with other painters including Camille Pissaro, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent van Gogh. After a stock market crash in the early 1880s he turned to painting full time. Gauguin romanticized Tahiti considering it a tropical paradise. He went there to live twice, from 1881 to 1883 and again from late 1895 until 1901, when he moved to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia where he died in 1903. Gauguin didn't find quite the tropical paradise he imagined in the South Pacific and he bemoaned the effects of French colonialism. However, his paintings of Tahiti helped to cement the South Pacific Islands as a sensual welcoming paradise. In 2014, one of Gauguin's Tahiti paintings ("When Will You Marry") sold for $210,000,000, one of the largest amounts ever paid for a single painting.