Artist: Paul Gauguin

We all know Paul Gauguin as one the great Impressionists who left France for Tahiti and invented a new, flatter, brighter style. What you may not know is that he was the son of a Creole woman from Peru and a rebellious French journalist. He was also a vocal critic of colonialism; a married man who abandoned his wife and children; and at the time of his death in 1903, he was awaiting a three-month long sentence for attacking the Catholic Church.