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

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a large oil painting completed by Paul Gauguin in Tahiti in 1897 and 1898, painted, according to his own later account, at a time of extreme personal despair after which he attempted suicide. Read from right to left, its frieze-like composition moves symbolically from a sleeping infant through the activities of adult life to an old woman near death, weaving together Tahitian imagery with broader questions of human origin, existence and mortality that Gauguin intended as a kind of philosophical testament. Now held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it is widely regarded as the culminating and most ambitious work of his Tahitian period.