A life read right to left

The picture is huge and wide, about 4 feet 7 inches tall and 12 feet 4 inches across, painted on a coarse, heavy sackcloth-type canvas. It is a frieze (a long horizontal band of figures, the word borrowed from the carved strips that run along the tops of Greek temples), and Gauguin meant it to be read right to left, against the way your eye normally travels. Read that way, it traces a single human life from birth to death.

Start at the right edge: a sleeping infant with three crouching women. That is the beginning, birth. Move to the center and a standing figure reaches up to pick a fruit, an Eve-like gesture of knowledge and "sin," standing for the busy daily life of young adulthood. Move to the far left and an old woman draws into herself, hands near her face, near death and seemingly reconciled to it. Birth, life, death, laid out across twelve feet.

Behind the central figures stands a tall blue idol with its arms raised, which Gauguin said represents "the Beyond", the world past this one. (It is one of his inventions, an image built to look ancient and sacred rather than a real deity he found.) Near the old woman a white bird clutches a lizard, which he said stands for the uselessness of empty words, the painting’s wry comment on its own grand ambitions.

And Gauguin lettered the work’s questions directly onto the canvas, in the upper-left corner, in a pale yellow field: the three French questions in plain capitals, with no question marks. He signed and dated the opposite corner, upper right ("P. Gauguin / 1897"). He even aged the two top corners to a worn gold, as if the whole thing were an old fresco pulled from some older, sacred tradition. Everything about it is built to feel less like a scene and more like scripture.