Paul Gauguin painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? between December 1897 and February 1898 in his Tahiti studio at Punaauia, after the September 1897 death of his beloved daughter Aline at age 19 in Copenhagen and the subsequent four-month-long depressive episode that culminated in Gauguin's attempted suicide by arsenic on the afternoon of the painting's completion.

Once Impressionism had taught everyone to see colour as light, the next generation asked what painting could do that photography could not. A reader's guide to Post-Impressionism — Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat.