When Gauguin Came to Taboga Island
November 9, 2026
A broke painter on his way to Panama
Before Tahiti made him famous, Paul Gauguin was flat broke and restless. In 1887 he left France with fellow painter Charles Laval, chasing a cheap, exotic place to work far from Paris, with a stop in Martinique on the way over. Before leaving, he had already told his wife Mette he was off “to live like a savage.”
Panama, at the time, meant one thing to foreigners passing through: the French canal project, already years into digging and far behind schedule.
Digging canal trenches to pay the bills
Panama in the 1880s drew plenty of people chasing work on that project, Gauguin among them. Gauguin and painter Charles Laval came to Panama in 1887, and running short of money, went to work on the French canal. The hours were long, the heat constant, the rain worse. It was not the trip he had pictured when he wrote to his wife.
Sick, then sent to recover on Taboga
The labor and the climate caught up with him fast. Having worked on the first French attempt to dig a canal between the Caribbean and the Pacific, an effort in which 22,000 workers died, Gauguin fell ill and was sent to recover on Taboga Island. He ended up living on Taboga twice before heading on to Martinique.
On the island he found part of what he had come looking for on paper: different light, dense greenery, a fishing village well away from the noise of Panama City. He did not paint his best-known work here, but biographers treat this stretch as the opening leg of the search that eventually led him to the South Pacific.
What’s left on the island today
His stay on Taboga is marked by an engraved plate on the island’s main beach. There is no Gauguin house or museum to tour here, just a small, quiet marker for a few months that happened more than 130 years ago.
From Taboga, Gauguin moved on to Martinique and later to Tahiti, where he painted the work he is remembered for today. It’s a detail that surprises a lot of visitors who come to the island just for the beach, with no idea a French painter passed through long before he became famous.
Finding the plaque
The plaque sits near the waterfront in San Pedro village, an easy stop if you’re walking through town or spending the afternoon at the beach. For current ferry schedules and fares to the island, check the getting there guide. For the fuller story of Taboga before and after Gauguin, see the island’s history page.