Tahiti: 'Ia Orana Maria' (Hail Mary). Oil on canvas painting by Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 - 8 May 1903), 1891. Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 and spent some of his childhood in Peru. He worked as a stockbroker with little success, and suffered from bouts of severe depression. He also painted. In 1891, Gauguin, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and financially destitute, sailed to the tropics to escape European civilisation and 'everything that is artificial and conventional'. His time there, particularly in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, was the subject of much interest.