Keeping it Real

Abstract

Visitors to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts can admire Paul Gauguin’s most famous painting, “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” The huge canvas depicts a variety of figures, all Tahitian, each engaged in a particular and significant act, raising symbolic questions about the human condition. Gauguin intended the painting to be read counter-intuitively from right to left, and it depicts three stages in our life journey—birth and childhood, adulthood, and old age and impending death.