ÜDS-Sosyal 2003-2 Soru=57

The point is made in the passage that Gauguin, during his service in the French navy, ----.

Gauguin began his career as a painter late in life.
Born in Paris in 1848 he was raised by his
widowed mother in Peru, where his paternal half
Peruvian grandmother lived. "You know. I have
Indian blood, Inca blood, in me" he later wrote,
"and it's reflected in everything I do". At 17,
Gauguin joined the French Navy and sailed
around the world, encountering many native
cultures during the ship's ports of call. In 1872, he
married a Danish woman named Mette Gad and
they settled in Paris, where he worked as a
stockbroker for a decade. All the while, Gauguin
collected contemporary art by the impressionists -
in particular Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, who later
became a friend, and Cezanne, whose primitive
style and sweeping colors affected him deeply. In
1883, at 35 Gauguin abruptly left his wife, his five
children and his bourgeois lifestyle to devote
himself to art. He traveled to Brittany, where he
painted and sculpted, and to Martinique, where he
discovered the vibrant beauty of the tropics. Then
he moved to Aries, in Provence, where he and his
friend Vincent van Gogh painted colorful
landscapes and planned their escape to Tahiti,
which they imagined as exotic, bountiful and free
of stifling European mores.