Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) gave up everything for painting while a successful stockbroker; he began with the Impressionists but found their effort to record only what the eye sees insufficient. For him painting should be not a copy of nature but a symbolic language of thought and feeling. This search took him first to the Brittany countryside of France, then, fleeing European civilisation, to Tahiti in the Pacific.

His style was radical: instead of modelling shadow and volume, flat, bright fields of colour; thick contours enclosing objects; a flattening of perspective. This approach, called "Synthetism" and "Cloisonnism," freed colour from its bond to reality and turned it into an emotional and symbolic force — a field could be pure red, a sky golden yellow.

In 1897, in poverty and illness, contemplating suicide after news of his daughter's death, he painted this four-metre canvas like a testament. The composition, meant to be read from right to left, begins with an infant, passes to the ripeness of life in a young figure picking fruit, and closes at the left with an old woman awaiting death. In the corners he wrote three questions in French: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The painting asks not about an event but about human existence as a whole.

Gauguin's turn to the "primitive," to non-Western worlds of form, is contested — it carries the marks of the colonial gaze. But the language of painting he built with flat colour and symbol directly fed the Fauves, the Expressionists, and abstraction. As Van Gogh expressed the inner world through the brushstroke, Gauguin loaded meaning onto colour and symbol, opening one of the doors of modern painting.