Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin

Where? Gallery 255 of the Museum of Fine Arts
When? 1897-1898
What do you see? This painting shows a story on the cycle of life. It consists of three parts corresponding to the three questions in the title of the painting.

• Where do we come from? The story starts on the bottom right with a sleeping baby. Next to the baby, three women are seated. To the right of them is a dog.
  
  
• What are we? Behind the three seated women are two women in purple sharing their thoughts with each other. The seated person to their left is scratching his head and looks in amazement at the two women who discuss their destiny with each other.
  
  Gauguin violated the rules of perspective on purpose when painting the seated man. In the center foreground is a person standing with his arm stretched above his head while picking fruit. This action may be a reference to the biblical story of Adam and Eve in Paradise. To the left of this person, a child is eating a piece of fruit. The child is surrounded by two white cats and a goat.
  
  
• Where are we going? Behind the goat is an idol, a white statue with raised arms. The idol is a statue of a Polynesian god and represents the afterlife. The woman to the left of the goat seems to listen to the idol. She is very similar to the Tahitian goddess Vairumati. To her left is an old woman who is nearing the end of her life. She is in her thoughts, thinking about what will happen after death. She seems to be at peace with her situation. At the bottom left is a white bird with a lizard in its claw. This bird represents a futility of words according to Gauguin’s description.
  
  

The scene is set in the woods, next to a river. In the background is the Pacific Ocean with a mountain on another island in the distance.

Backstory: The French title of this painting is D'où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous? Gauguin included this title on the top left of the painting. A valuable source of information to understand this painting are the letters that Gauguin wrote to George-Daniel de Monfreid, an art collector and painter in France.

Based on these letters, we know that when Gauguin started to work on this painting, he was in a dark period of this life. He faced quite some debt, bad health, the death of his favorite daughter, and he wanted to kill himself. However, before dying, he wanted to complete a large canvas about the meaning of life.

For about one month, he worked day and night on the painting. When it was finished, he considered this to be his best work ever and wrote that he would never make a better painting. Some other works that he completed during this dark period of his life are the Landscape with Two Goats (also known as Tarari Maruru) and Man Picking Fruit from a Tree.

After Gauguin completed the Where Do We Come From painting, he attempted suicide but failed at it. The painting was exhibited in 1898 in Paris and received mixed reviews. In 1901, the painting was sold for 2500 French Francs (which is equivalent to about $15,000 today).

Landscape with Two Goats by Gauguin

Man Picking Fruit from a Tree by Gauguin

Who is Gauguin? Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 in Paris, France, and died in 1903 in French Polynesia. Gauguin is considered to be a Post-Impressionist artist, though his work differs from the Post-impressionists by the unique colors that he used and the feelings he expressed in his paintings. Just like paintings by Van Gogh, who was a friend of Gauguin, the works of Gauguin are often recognizable from a distance.

Gauguin was only a full-time artist during the last 20 years of his life. Until the crash of the French stock market and the art market in 1882, Gauguin was a successful stock and art broker, yearly making the equivalent of about $250,000 today.

​In 1891, he decided to move to Tahiti in French Polynesia where he stayed for two years. Upon his arrival, he created some of his famous paintings, like Hail Mary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. After an unsuccessful return to France for two years, Gauguin returned to French Polynesia where he lived until his death.

Hail Mary by Gauguin

In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse by Gauguin

​Fun fact: This painting is featured in the book Origin (Amazon Link) by Dan Brown. In the book, the painting hangs in Casa Mila in Barcelona, which was a private house designed by Antoni Gaudí. The painting refers to the search for the existential questions of ‘where do we come from?’ and ‘where are we going?’. The painting by Gauguin does not answer these questions.

​Gauguin kept the painting and symbolism in this painting quite vague to stimulate the viewer to think about these questions. That has certainly worked for some people in Dan Brown’s book as some characters are actively looking for the answers to these questions.

Casa Mila in Barcelona, Spain

---

Written by Eelco Kappe

References: 

• Pielkovo, Ruth (1922), The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel de Monfreid, Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, NY.
• medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/10412
• Khan Academy