When Will You Marry?

What a title for a painting.  Heard of this Gaugin painting in an article about Qatar’s art scene.  Reportedly some Qataris bought it for $300 mill.  Says Wiki, back in 1893:

Gauguin placed this painting on consignment at the exhibition at a price of 1,500 francs, the highest price he assigned and shared by only one other painting, but had no takers.

Gaugin didn’t always crush it with his titles (Study of A Nude, etc) but sometimes he nailed it.  Here is Where Are You Going?

(sometimes less interestingly called Woman Holding A Fruit)

Of course best of all, Where Do We Come From?  What Are We?  Where Are We Going? at the good ol’ Boston MFA.

Charles Morice (fr) two years later tried to raise a public subscription to purchase the painting for the nation. To assist this endeavour, Gauguin wrote a detailed description of the work concluding with the messianic remark that he spoke in parables: “Seeing they see not, hearing they hear not”. The subscription nevertheless failed.

You can read about Geoff Dyer’s frustrating experiences with these paintings and Gaugin and Tahiti in:

I was bummed I missed that dude at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, bet we could’ve had some laughs.