Recently Sotheby's Auction House of London announced that a rarely seen painting by the French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin would be put up for auction on June 23rd. The painting, titled L'Apparition, was executed by Gauguin in 1902 on the French Polynesian Island of Hiva Oa, and is a study of a local magician and a nude. The work has been in private ownership since 1944, and if it garners its pre-auction estimate of $15-million, it would become the second most expensive painting by the artist since his work, Mata Mua, sold for $24-million in 1989. Born in 1848, Gauguin's first career was as a bank broker, a vocation he left when he was 25-years-old in order to become a painter. After initially collaborating with several members of the Impressionist circle (including Vincent Van Gogh), Gauguin traveled across France and Spain, eventually moving halfway across the world to work and live in Tahiti. There he produced some of his best-known work before dying of syphilis at the young age of 54. [KMG] The first link leads to a news story from the Washington Post about the upcoming sale of L'Apparition by Sotheby's. The second link will take users to another article about the upcoming auction from the Netherlands News Agency. The third link leads to a detailed description of the painting and its provenance provided by Sotheby's. The fourth link takes visitors to a gallery of 35 works by Gauguin, including several of his earliest pieces, provided by the National Gallery of Art. The fifth link leads to a beautiful online exhibit from the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands that explores the relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin. The final link leads to a small, but interesting, online exhibit that highlights the work of Gauguin and his colleagues during their time in the French village of Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. [KMG]