PAUL GAUGUIN - Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? - oil on canvas, 139- 375 cm. - 1897, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

Gauguin himself affirmed that after painting “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going” he had tried to commit suicide. We can not affirm with certain if this was true or not, but it's a fact that just before painting his masterwork, a series of events followed each other at a dramatic way, like a presage of a tragic end that would happen five years later. First, his economical situation gets almost unsustainable –however, he rejected an amount of money that the Ministry offered him because he considered it a “charity”- while the syphilis and the alcoholism turn his physical situation into a torture. Nevertheless, the toughest hit arrived by mail: in the spring of 1891, a letter informed him of the death of his daughter Aline, at age 21. This tragic event supposed not only the rupture of the artist with his wife –irrationally accusing her of this death- but also his definitive rupture with any vestige of faith. In a devastating letter wrote this year, Gauguin affirms: “My daughter is dead. Now I don't need God.”

In this psychical state Gauguin embarks on the epic mission of creating his artistic testament, a work that resumes all his other creations: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is not only the most colossal canvas that Gauguin painted in his entire life, but also the work that expound the entire philosophical and pictorial doctrine of the artist.

In a striking horizontal format, the canvas follows an inverted chronological evolution, beginning at the left corner with the heartrending figure of an ancient mummy that, in fetal position, covers his ears with the hands; while at the right corner, a baby, symbol of the life and the innocence, is surrounded by three Tahitian young women. At the centre of the picture, the figure of a man who takes a fruit symbolizes the temptation of the man. Structuring the canvas in an inverted chronological order, Gauguin seems to point the primitive, the innocent, as the only one way to the artist.