Tahitian Women on the Beach
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Paul Gauguin, 1897–98. Oil on canvas, 139.1 × 374.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin · 1897–98
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 139.1 × 374.6 cm
- Held by
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- French Polynesia
The painter
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently.
Nearby
Related works
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
The Yellow Christ
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
What to look at
Nearly four metres wide, painted on coarse sacking because Gauguin could not afford proper canvas, and intended by him as a summary of everything he had to say. He told a correspondent to read it from right to left: a sleeping infant at the right, figures in the middle of life at the centre reaching for fruit, and at the far left an old woman crouched with her head in her hands, near death. The blue idol behind the central group is Gauguin's invention rather than any actual Polynesian deity, which matters — the painting presents itself as indigenous cosmology and is in fact a European's composite. The colour is unusually muted for him: blue-greens and ochres with very little of the vermilion he normally relied on. The title is painted directly onto the top left corner, in French, like a label on a specimen.