Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Vague vaguely suggests a picnic. Escaped from France, Gauguin seemed to believe his Tahitian life was picnicky. “Everything in the landscape blinded me, dazzled me,” he wrote in the Noa Noa journal. It was a feeling that never subsided. 
The painting’s narrative begins on the right with the dog watching over the sleeping infant and proceeds through the stages of life to old age. The old woman with her knees drawn up and her hands holding her head suggests the nearness of death that comes without dread. The white bird indicates a sense of the universe beyond earthly existence.
No food is evident.
Featured Image: Paul Gauguin. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
See Paul Gauguin. Noa Noa. Notes et postface de Jérôme Vérain. Éditions Mille et une Nuits (Paris, 2002)