A long road to a museum
After its first showing the painting changed hands many times. The collector Gabriel Frizeau bought it from Vollard for 2,500 francs in 1901; from there it passed through a Paris gallery, then to the Norwegian collector Jørgen Breder Stang, then through the dealer Alfred Gold, then to a New York gallery. In 1936 it reached its permanent home: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought it on the sixteenth of April for $80,000.
The testament, and what hangs beside it
It is now one of the MFA’s signature holdings and the centerpiece of Gauguin’s late legend, routinely read as his testament, the painting where he tried to put the whole arc of a human life and its unanswerable questions onto a single wall. It is one of the most ambitious pictures of its era.
And the honest way to stand in front of it is to hold two things at once. It is a masterpiece of Symbolist ambition, and it is the product of a man who built a romantic "paradise" on top of a colonized island and took adolescent girls as partners while he did it. The greatness does not cancel the rest, and the rest does not cancel the greatness. A modern viewer is allowed, and probably required, to see both.