Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98): The Tahiti Painting Gauguin Made as His Intended Suicide Note
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?) between December 1897 and February 1898 in his Tahiti studio at Punaauia on the west coast of the island, approximately twenty kilometres south of the capital city of Papeete. The 139 × 375 centimetre oil-on-canvas — Gauguin's largest single composition by some margin — was painted in approximately eight weeks of continuous work after the September 1897 death of his beloved nineteen-year-old daughter Aline in Copenhagen from pneumonia. The death reached Gauguin in Tahiti through his wife Mette's letter approximately five weeks after the event, and produced a four-month depressive episode that culminated in Gauguin's attempted suicide by arsenic on the afternoon of the painting's February 1898 completion. The arsenic dose was insufficient and Gauguin survived; he wrote about the suicide attempt in his February 1898 letter to his Paris friend Daniel de Monfreid — "I went to the mountains with a box of arsenic, I took the full dose. The body was unwilling. I vomited for two days and survived." The painting was therefore intended as Gauguin's suicide note. He survived to live and paint for another five years until his 1903 death in the Marquesas Islands.
Tahiti 1891-1903, Aline's death, and the painting's emergence
Gauguin had made his first move to Tahiti in 1891 — at age 43, after the failure of his 1888 attempt to establish a Brittany-based painters' colony with Van Gogh at Pont-Aven, the catastrophic 1888 Arles working stint that ended with Van Gogh's ear-cutting episode, and the dissolution of his 11-year marriage to the Danish Lutheran Mette-Sophie Gad — and had returned briefly to France 1893-95 before permanently re-settling in French Polynesia in 1895. The Punaauia studio was a simple two-room wooden structure Gauguin built himself on land leased from a local Tahitian couple. The 1897 death of his daughter Aline (his second of five children with Mette, who had been raised in Copenhagen by Mette after the 1888 marital dissolution) was the immediate biographical trigger for the painting. Gauguin had not seen Aline since her 1891 visit to him in Paris before the first Tahiti trip; she was thirteen at the time. He had been corresponding with her sporadically across the next six years. The news of her death — combined with Gauguin's own continuing health problems (advanced syphilis contracted approximately 1895, chronic conjunctivitis, chronic depression) and the failure of his commercial relationship with the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard — produced the four-month depressive episode the painting was made inside. Gauguin's December 1897 letter to Monfreid describes the painting's intent: "I have wanted, before dying, to paint a large canvas that I have in my head, and I have worked night and day this whole month with extraordinary fever." The painting is the largest and most ambitious of Gauguin's career.
The composition, the title, and the right-to-left reading direction
The painting reads right-to-left rather than left-to-right — Gauguin specified this in his February 1898 letter to Monfreid and in the painted Tahitian inscriptions at the upper-left and upper-right corners of the canvas. The reading order is: at the RIGHT, a sleeping infant (representing birth and "Where do we come from?"), at the CENTRE, a standing young Tahitian woman reaching to pick fruit from a tree (representing adult life and "What are we?"), at the LEFT, an old crouched woman in a foetal position with her hands at her ears (representing death and "Where are we going?"). The background landscape of Polynesian mountains and the Pacific Ocean is continuous across the entire horizontal panorama. The composition is organised as a panoramic life-cycle reading from birth to death — the right-to-left direction is deliberate (Gauguin had absorbed the Polynesian convention that reading direction is contextually variable and not the European left-to-right default) and was intended to be experienced as a meditation on the painting's title questions rather than as a Western-narrative sequence. The Tahitian figures are derived partly from Gauguin's actual neighbours in Punaauia (the standing fruit-picker is identified as Pahura, Gauguin's 14-year-old common-law partner of the 1896-99 period, whose specific exoticisation by Gauguin is one of the painting's primary ethical-critique points) and partly from Polynesian carved wooden figures Gauguin had studied in the Papeete ethnographic collections.
Primitivism, ethical critique, and the painting's complicated 20th-century reception
Where Do We Come From? has had four reception phases. The first (1898-1903) was its working life in Gauguin's possession — the painting was shipped to Paris in 1898 to Ambroise Vollard for sale at Vollard's Paris gallery, was exhibited briefly at the 1898 Galerie Vollard show, did not sell, and was eventually purchased by the French collector Gabriel Frizeau in 1901 for the equivalent of approximately 2,500 francs (about $20,000 in today's purchasing-power terms, a very small fraction of the painting's eventual value). The second phase (1903-1936) was the steady canonical-modernist consolidation — the painting passed through several private collections, was acquired by the current Boston collection in 1936, and was consistently cited in 1910s-30s European modernism scholarship as the canonical example of the late-Gauguin Tahiti period. The third phase (1936-1995) was the post-WWII canonical-popular consolidation through Boston Museum School exhibitions and through Robert Maillard's influential 1950 monograph and Henri Perruchot's 1961 biography. The fourth phase (1995-present) is the postcolonial-ethical-critique reception. The 1995 publication of the Tahitian art-historian Stéphane Vacherot's Gauguin and the Tahitian Imaginary inaugurated the contemporary academic critique of Gauguin's primitivism — the painting's exoticisation of Polynesian figures (particularly the underage Pahura), the appropriation of Polynesian visual sources without attribution, the operation of the painting inside the European colonial-imperial extraction framework, and the painting's role in popularising a romanticised Tahiti that erased the actual contemporary conditions of French-administered Polynesian life under colonial rule. The critique has been continuously extended across the 2000s-2020s by Polynesian and Pacific-region academic writing and is now the standard contemporary scholarly framing of the painting alongside the formal-art-historical reading. Both readings are valid; both are required for any honest 2020s writing about the painting.
Why the painting matters now — closing the 111-post Wix series
The painting is the appropriate closing canvas for this 111-post Wix series on Western painting (May 31 2026 → October 2 2026) for three specific reasons. First: it is a Hub C single-painting deep dive in the same compositional register the series has used since the early posts — biographical context + technical analysis + reception history + 21st-century relevance. Second: it foregrounds the ethical dimension that 2020s writing about pre-1970s Western painting must increasingly address. Western art history is not a neutral subject; the canvases the series has covered (Vermeer's domestic interiors, Caravaggio's Roman patronage networks, the French political painting sequence, the modern-painting-invention canvases) all operate inside specific historical-economic-political conditions that contemporary writing has to acknowledge. The Gauguin is the most-explicit single example in the canon of how Western painting carries both formal innovation and ethical weight simultaneously. Third: the painting's title — "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" — is the appropriate question to leave the series with. The 111 posts of this Wix series have been an extended attempt to answer the first two questions for one painting at a time. The third question — where do we go next? — is open. The series continues into 2026-27 with additional posts the owner and the editorial team will plan together; the 111-post initial batch is complete on this canvas. We finish where Gauguin finished, on a Tahiti panorama painted in eight weeks by a painter who intended it as his suicide note and who survived to keep working for five more years. The painting is now held in a Boston collection where it has been continuously since 1936 and is one of the most-cited single exhibits for the contemporary discussion of Western modernism's ethical-formal dual status.
Key takeaways
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) 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 (west coast, ~20 km south of Papeete). 139 × 375 cm oil on canvas — Gauguin's largest single composition by some margin. Held in a Boston collection continuously since 1936.
Immediate biographical trigger: September 1897 death of Gauguin's 19-year-old daughter Aline from pneumonia in Copenhagen (news reached Gauguin in Tahiti via wife Mette's letter ~5 weeks later). The death + Gauguin's continuing health problems (advanced syphilis from ~1895, chronic conjunctivitis, chronic depression) + failure of commercial relationship with Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard = 4-month depressive episode. Painting was intended as suicide note.
February 1898: Gauguin attempted suicide by arsenic on the painting's completion. Dose insufficient. He survived. February 1898 letter to Daniel de Monfreid: 'I went to the mountains with a box of arsenic, I took the full dose. The body was unwilling. I vomited for two days and survived.' Lived to paint another 5 years until 1903 death in the Marquesas Islands.
Composition reads RIGHT-TO-LEFT (Gauguin specified in February 1898 letter): at right = sleeping infant (birth, 'Where do we come from?'). At centre = standing young Tahitian fruit-picker (adult life, 'What are we?'). At left = old crouched woman in foetal position (death, 'Where are we going?'). Background = continuous Polynesian mountain and Pacific Ocean panorama. Reading direction is deliberate Polynesian convention.
Pahura controversy: the central standing fruit-picker is identified as Pahura, Gauguin's 14-year-old common-law partner during the 1896-99 period. Gauguin's relationship with an underage Polynesian girl + his exoticised painting of her is one of the painting's primary 21st-century ethical-critique points. The relationship operates inside the French colonial-administrative framework that legitimated relationships between European male settlers and underage Indigenous Polynesian women.
Postcolonial-ethical-critique reception (1995-present): inaugurated by Tahitian art-historian Stéphane Vacherot's 1995 monograph Gauguin and the Tahitian Imaginary. Critique addresses: exoticisation of Polynesian figures, appropriation of Polynesian visual sources without attribution, operation inside European colonial-imperial extraction framework, role in popularising romanticised Tahiti that erased actual contemporary conditions of French-administered Polynesian life under colonial rule. Now the standard contemporary scholarly framing alongside formal-art-historical reading.
Closing canvas for the 111-post Wix series on Western painting (May 31 2026 → October 2 2026). Three reasons: (1) Hub C single-painting deep-dive in the series's established register. (2) Foregrounds the ethical dimension that 2020s writing about pre-1970s Western painting must increasingly address. (3) The painting's three title questions — Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? — leave the series with the appropriate open question for what comes next.
Browse Post-Impressionist + Symbolist + late-19th-century French painting prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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