How Grief and Debt Shaped Gauguin's Final Masterpiece

Feature image: Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? What Are We Going? (detail), 1897–98 via Gauguin.org

Paul Gauguin finished Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98) at a pace that startled even people who knew how fast he could work. The canvas runs nearly twelve and a half feet wide, the largest he ever attempted, and by his own account he completed the entire composition in about a month. He was living in Punaauia, on the island of Tahiti, in a state he later described to his friend and dealer Daniel de Monfried as having lost all courage. His health was failing, debts were mounting in Paris, and his daughter Aline had died of pneumonia in France earlier that year, a loss he learned about by letter months after the fact. Gauguin considered the finished painting his masterpiece, telling de Monfried he believed it surpassed everything he had made before and doubted he would ever produce anything as good again.

The composition unfolds like a frieze, and scholars generally read it moving right to left rather than the direction Western eyes default to. At the far right, an infant lies among three seated women, a straightforward image of birth. Moving left, the figures shift into the business of adult life, gathering fruit, talking, working, a middle stretch of the canvas dense with activity and human contact. By the time the eye reaches the left edge, the mood changes entirely. A hunched, elderly woman sits with her head in her hands, positioned beside a strange white bird that Gauguin later said represented the futility of words. The progression traces a full human lifespan across a single tropical landscape, using the sequence of figures rather than any single narrative moment to carry the painting's meaning.

Behind this central band of figures stands a pale blue statue, an idol with raised arms that breaks from the naturalistic color palette used everywhere else in the composition. Gauguin identified this figure in his own writing as a representation of what lies beyond ordinary human life, a deliberately ambiguous stand-in for the spiritual or metaphysical rather than any single deity drawn from a specific tradition. Its cool color separates it from the warm greens and golds of the jungle around it, and its placement behind the human figures rather than among them keeps it at a remove, watching the lifespan play out rather than participating in it.

Gauguin described the composition himself in the same February 1898 letter to Daniel de Monfried, walking through the figures in roughly the order a viewer's eye would find them. Near the infant and the three seated women, two figures dressed in purple lean toward each other, confiding something the viewer is never given access to, while a large, deliberately misproportioned crouching figure raises an arm and stares at them in what Gauguin described as astonishment that anyone would dare question their own destiny. 

At the composition's center, a tall figure reaches up to pick fruit from an overhanging branch, a gesture widely read as a Tahitian recasting of Eve at the Tree of Knowledge. Gauguin left the figure's sex somewhat ambiguous, which several scholars have connected to his interest in hermaphroditic imagery elsewhere in his Tahitian work, and positioned the moment of reaching and choosing as the composition's psychological hinge point, the place where the abstract questions in the title become a concrete human act. Two cats sit near a child close by, and a white goat stands nearby as well, animals Gauguin used elsewhere in his Tahitian paintings as shorthand for a life lived without the burden of self-awareness, in contrast to the figures around them who are actively wrestling with it.

What makes the painting's backstory unusual is how thoroughly Gauguin documented his state of mind while making it. In a February 1898 letter to de Monfried, he described going into the mountains after finishing the canvas, intending to end his life with arsenic he had saved from an earlier illness, choosing the location specifically so his body would not be easily found. He survived, recovered enough to keep working, and continued corresponding with de Monfried about the painting's fate in Paris in the months that followed. 

Art historians have treated the account with some caution since Gauguin was, by most descriptions, acutely aware of his own myth-making and prone to shaping his biography for maximum effect on the people funding his career from a distance. Whether the attempt happened exactly as he described it or not, the timing lines up with a period of genuine crisis, the debts, the illness, and Aline's death all converging in the months before and after the canvas was finished.

The same letter that describes his despair also includes detailed instructions for how the painting should be framed and exhibited once it reached Paris, specifying a plain strip of whitewashed wood to make the canvas read like a mural, along with guidance on who should be invited to see it. The instinct toward image control never left him, even at what he presented as his lowest point. De Monfried ultimately sold the painting for a thousand francs, a modest sum that nonetheless reached Gauguin at a moment when it mattered.

The painting's title borrows its structure from a Catholic catechism Gauguin would have encountered as a child, which posed a nearly identical set of questions about human origin, nature, and destiny. Gauguin spent much of his adult life positioning himself as an opponent of organized religion and the society that produced it, choosing Tahiti in part because he wanted distance from European Catholicism and its institutions. The questions from his childhood catechism resurfaced almost verbatim as the title of the painting he considered his life's summation suggests how much of that early framework stayed with him even as he tried to build something entirely outside it. The painting does not answer the three questions it poses. Gauguin left the figures, the idol, and the bird open enough that the composition functions as a meditation rather than a statement, an approach consistent with the Symbolist circles he had moved through in France before leaving for the Pacific.

After de Monfried sold the canvas in Paris, it moved through a long chain of collectors before settling permanently in the United States. The painting passed to the French collector Gabriel Frizeau, who sold it around 1913 to the Galerie Barbazanges. From there it went to Jørgen Breder Stang, a Norwegian ship owner and collector, sometime before 1920. Stang eventually sold the painting through the dealer Alfred Gold in 1935, and it was acquired the following year by the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York, the gallery that ultimately placed it with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Each transaction moved the painting further from the circumstances of its making, gradually making it one of the most closely studied objects in an American museum's collection.

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