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Panama Canal

In 1887, Gauguin left France along with his friend, another young painter, Charles Laval. His dream was to purchase land of his own on the small Panamanian island of Taboga, where he stated he desired to live "on fish and fruit and for nothing… without anxiety for the day or for the morrow." By the time he reached the port city of Colón, Gauguin was out of money and found work as a laborer on the French construction of the Panama Canal. During this time, Gauguin penned letters to his wife, Mette, lamenting the arduous conditions: "I have to dig… from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening, under the tropical sun and rain," he wrote. "At night I am devoured by mosquitoes." Meanwhile, Laval had been earning money by drawing portraits of canal officials, work which Gauguin detested since only portraits done in a lewd manner would sell.

Gauguin held a profound contempt for Panama, and at one point was arrested in Panama City for urinating in public. Marched across town at gunpoint, Gauguin was ordered to pay a fine of four francs. After discovering that land on Taboga was priced far beyond reach (and after falling deathly ill on the island where he was subsequently interned in a yellow fever and malaria sanatorium), he decided to leave Panama.