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Paul Gauguin (artist) French, 1848 - 1903 Te Pape Nave Nave (Delectable Waters), 1898 oil on canvas Overall: 74 x 95.3 cm (29 1/8 x 37 1/2 in.) framed: 90.8 x 111.4 cm (35 3/4 x 43 7/8 in.) Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon 1973.68.2 |
Object 7 of 7
In 1898, Gauguin sent a group of works for exhibition in Paris. The centerpiece was a painting more than twelve-feet long on hemp sacking material with the French inscription, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Intended to be seen with it were eight identically sized smaller works that were excerpted from “Where are we going?” These were not preparatory studies but variations painted after the larger work was competed and so represented a kind of rethinking or perhaps summing up by the artist. This painting is one of these smaller works.
One of the figures repeated here from the larger work is the blue goddess. As Gauguin described her, she “…seems to indicate the hereafter.” She is the Polynesian deity Hina, but as her worship—and idols—had already disappeared from the island, Gauguin modeled her after a Hindu goddess in his collection of photographs. Gauguin intended “Where are we going?” to be his final artistic statement. He had been ill and depressed and, as he wrote friends, had attempted suicide. Though it relates generally to themes of life and death, represented at opposite ends of the canvas by an infant and an old woman, Gauguin left “Where are we going?” deliberately mysterious: “…Known symbols would congeal the canvas into a melancholy reality,” he wrote, “and the problem indicated would no longer be a poem.”
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