The two upper corners are chrome yellow, with an inscription on the left, and my name on the right, like a fresco on a golden wall with its corners damaged. “It is a canvas about five feet by twelve.

In later letters, Gauguin described Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? saying: Finally, running out of money in Tahiti after a failed building project, Gauguin constructed a massive canvas, and poured his last great energy into an allegorical diorama describing destiny, the futility of language and death. His reputation in Paris was blighted after leaving his wife, his paintings weren't selling, and in 1897 his estranged daughter Aline died of pneumonia, leaving Gauguin fixated on their lost relationship. During his time on the Caribbean island of Martinique he contracted long-running cases of dysentery and malaria, he walked with a limp from a poorly healed ankle, broken in a fight five years earlier, and was exhausted from battling syphilis and its brutal treatment regime.

The years leading up to December of 1897 had been rough for Gauguin. The painting he completed before this suicide expressed his personal gospel, a dream-state allegory spanning the largest canvas of his career. In the winter of 1897, Paul Gauguin set down his brush, walked up a hill near his home in Tahiti and swallowed a huge amount of arsenic.

Who are we where are we going