“At every single moment of one’s life,” wrote Oscar Wilde in “De Profundis,” “one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.”

The Irishman, languishing in Reading Gaol for “gross indecency,” can’t have been thinking of Paul Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” because it was painted oceans away around the same time. Yet who else but Wilde would have had the chutzpah to propose a single answer to three such vast questions?

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