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.

Between 1863 and 1907 — forty-four years across three French regimes and one global imperial network — six paintings produced the formal vocabulary of Western modernism. Manet's 1863 Olympia, Monet's 1872 Impression Sunrise, Cézanne's 1890s still lifes, Van Gogh's 1889 Cypresses, Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases, and Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon form the load-bearing sequence in which European painting moved from academic-Salon convention to abstract formal modernis

Paul Cézanne painted ~270 still lifes between 1865 and his 1906 death — the largest still-life corpus of any 19th-century European painter. The c.1893 Paris-collection canvas shows seven apples and a small jug on a tilted brown tabletop. The painting carries Cézanne's specific contribution: deliberate flattening of pictorial space that Picasso and Braque would extend into Cubism 14 years later.

Vincent van Gogh painted his first major cypress canvas in late June 1889 from his second-floor bedroom window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near the Provençal village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had voluntarily admitted himself in May 1889 following the December 1888 Arles ear-cutting episode. The 93.4 × 74 centimetre oil-on-canvas was one of approximately fifteen cypress paintings Van Gogh would complete in the next thirteen months.

Vincent van Gogh painted his bedroom at the Yellow House in Arles three times between October 1888 and September 1889 — first in the room itself, then twice from memory in a Saint-Rémy asylum nine months later. The three canvases are nearly identical in subject and composition, almost identical in colour, yet describe three different mental states: the painter at home, the painter in crisis, and the painter looking back.

From around 1882 until his death in 1906, Paul Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire — a limestone ridge twenty kilometres east of his house in Aix-en-Provence — more than sixty times in oil and another forty in watercolour. The hundred-image obsession is the most concentrated motif-study in nineteenth-century European painting and the visible record of how Cézanne worked his way, picture by picture, into the language that the entire twentieth century would inherit.

When Vincent van Gogh died in the summer of 1890, he had sold almost nothing. Today his name sits beside the handful of painters everyone can name from memory. The strange part of that story is that the person who made it happen never picked up a brush. Her name was Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and for a long time art history barely mentioned her. This is the story of how a young widow turned a room full of unsold canvases into one of the most beloved names in painting. A Painter

There is not one Sunflowers painting. There are seven, painted in two intense bursts over fourteen months in Arles. They were a decoration for a house that was supposed to hold a school of painters and never did.

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.