Paul Gauguin and Life's Questions

We went to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts yesterday where I happened upon a painting that Paul Gauguin described as his masterpiece. You've probably seen it somewhere before--it's called "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" One source reports that Gauguin felt so good about it that he considered commiting suicide when it was finished, fully convinced that he could never come close to it again. That's what I call a masterpiece!

He painted it in Tahiti in the late 1890s, having gone there in 1891 to escape to a more "primitive" culture from the complexities of France. The painting, according to Gauguin, ought to be read from right to left. The three groupings across the canvas represent three stages of life: the three women with a child represent life's beginnings, the middle grouping represents young adulthood, and the third group depicts aging and death. The goddess at the top left of the painting directs our attention toward the next life.

I was intrigued by the title. How did Gauguin seize upon these three questions for the title of his painting? After some digging, I have at least one possible answer. It seems that, in his teenage years, Gauguin attended the Petit Seminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin near Orleans in France. He took a class on liturgy there, taught by the Bishop of Orleans, one Bishop Dupanloup, who constructed a catechism for the class around three questions--"Where Does Humanity Come From? Where is It Going? How Does Humanity Proceed?"

Gauguin never cared much for the religion of his native France--but it is most interesting that his disdain for the Church didn't translate into disdain for the basic questions that give ultimate meaning to human existence. Far off in Tahiti, he found human beings struggling with the same questions--and his painting provides a connection between the questions that had been raised for him in France by an obviously good teacher and viewers like me who gaze now at the painting and find in it the common human search for answers.