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Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Paul Gauguin, 1890s

Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Painted in the 1890s and stretching 374.6 cm wide, it is a long, frieze-like canvas that asks to be read slowly, figure by figure, from one end to the other.

Where to see it

The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, located at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Works on canvas can be moved, lent or rotated off view, so check the museum's official website for current display status before you plan your visit.

What to look for in person

Read it from right to left

Stand back first so you can take in the full width of the canvas, then start at the right-hand edge. There, a sleeping infant lies near a group of seated women, suggesting the beginning of life. Your eye then moves toward the centre and finally to the far left, where a hunched older woman sits with her head in her hands. Following this sequence turns the painting into a kind of journey through a human lifetime, echoing the three questions of its title.

The figure at the centre

Near the middle of the composition, a tall figure reaches upward to pick fruit from a branch. This standing figure acts as a hinge for the whole scene, dividing the groups on either side and drawing your attention vertically in a picture that is otherwise strongly horizontal. Look at how the upright pose contrasts with the seated and reclining bodies around it, and notice the fruit motif, which recurs elsewhere in the painting, including a child shown eating fruit nearby.

The inscription and the idol

Look to the upper left corner, where Gauguin painted the title in French on a yellow patch that resembles a worn fresco or label: D'ou venons-nous / Que sommes-nous / Ou allons-nous. In the background on the left stands a blue idol with raised arms, a reference to spiritual belief that sits apart from the everyday human activity in the foreground. Near the old woman, look also for a white bird holding a lizard in its claws.

About the painting

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a large painting by Paul Gauguin, made in the 1890s and now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. It measures 139.1 cm high by 374.6 cm wide, a format much wider than it is tall, which gives it the feel of a mural or a painted frieze rather than a conventional easel picture. Gauguin painted it in Tahiti, where he spent much of his later career, and it draws on the people, landscape and imagery he encountered there, combined with his own symbolic language. In front of the canvas, it helps to think of it less as a single moment and more as a sequence. Figures are arranged across a dense landscape of trees, water and flat areas of colour, each group suggesting a different stage or condition of life. Gauguin did not use traditional perspective to unify the space; instead he relied on rhythm, repeated poses and broad zones of blue, green and warm earth tones to hold the composition together. The title, written directly on the painting, frames the scene as a meditation on origins, existence and destiny rather than a narrative with a clear story. Gauguin himself regarded the work as a summation of his ideas, and it is often discussed as one of the central statements of his Tahitian period and of Symbolist painting more broadly. For visitors, its scale rewards time: view it from a distance to grasp the overall arrangement, then move closer to study individual figures, the idol and the painted inscription.

Key facts

More by Paul Gauguin

• Young boy from Brittany
• Arearea — Musée d'Orsay
• Study of a Nude
• Mahana Ma'a — Cincinnati Art Museum

Sources

• Wikidata Q890678
• www.mfa.org