Post-Impressionism · 1897
Paul Gauguin 1848–1903
Museum of Fine Arts · Boston
Read right to left from birth to death, Gauguin's Tahitian testament poses humanity's oldest questions across a single vast canvas.
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Chapter 1 of 7
You are standing before Paul Gauguin's final testament — a canvas nearly four meters wide, painted in Tahiti in 1897 when he believed he was dying. He asked three questions in the title and answered none of them, offering instead a frieze of Polynesian figures moving, reaching, and resting across a world between paradise and extinction.
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