D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?

Gauguin painted this huge canvas in Tahiti over the winter of 1897 into 1898, at the lowest point of his life. His favourite daughter had just died, he was sick and deep in debt, and by his own account he meant to finish one last great picture and then kill himself. He read it from right to left, like a question moving backward through a life. A sleeping infant at one end, figures reaching and eating in the middle, and at the far left an old woman near death, drawn up into herself. A strange blue idol stands in the shadows. He scrawled the three questions of the title straight onto the canvas in the top corner. Afterward he did attempt to take his own life with arsenic, and survived, and lived a few more years in the Pacific.