GAUGUIN, Paul
(b. 1848, Paris, d. 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, French Polynesia)

Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?

1897
Oil on canvas, 141 x 346 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In December 1897, the sick painter, exhausted by solitude and poverty, tried to commit suicide, which he had been contemplating for a few months. He first mentioned suicide in June 1897. In December, his mind was set. With unbelievable courage, he decided to put the final touch to his work. He painted his declaration of artistic principles, Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? he worked at it during the whole month with an incredible fever. After completing the painting he took to the mountains where he swallowed a large dose of arsenic. However, he survived the suicide attempt and life went on and so did his work.

In Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Gauguin's most ambitious painting in terms of size, number of figures, and probable overlay of meanings, there are Tahitian natives in unusual and probably contrived meditative poses and a foreboding primitive idol. In a way yet to be explained, the painting has to do with human destiny.

In a letter of February 1898 to Daniel de Monfreid, Gauguin had written that he had wished to paint a large canvas without the benefit of preparatory sketches, done on rough sackcloth and which had taken him less than a month. After describing the picture at some length, making it clear that the work should be read from the sleeping baby in the bottom right towards the crouching old woman in the lefthand side, he concluded, "I've finished a philosophical work...I think it very good, if I have the strength to copy it, I shall send it to you."

However, an intricate and detailed preparatory sketch for the whole work exists, throwing the story into doubt. Certainly Gauguin had every reason to try to kill himself; he was very ill and had just learned of the death of his favourite child Aline. It is equally characteristic, however, that he might have attempted to consolidate the myth of artistic martyr that he had been creating steadily both in his painting and in his writing. To leave such a major and complex canvas as a last grand flourish would have virtually guaranteed his posthumous artistic reputation back in Paris.




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