Paradise is explored as a theme in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's major exhibition "Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia," on view through Sept. 3.

This sumptuous display of late 19th and early 20th century European masterworks reflect visions of a rural, idyllic Arcadia as once imagined by ancient poet Virgil's in his Eclogues (37 B.C.).

Critic Mary Tompkins Lewis writes of the exhibit, "...all such dreams of Arcadia, whether private or public, timeless or modern, sanguine or strangely sinister, fail to prepare us for the staggeringly powerful confrontations with its mythic realm and conventions that appeared in vanguard painting in the years surrounding 1900. At the core of the Philadelphia exhibition stand three monumental works around which the exhibition is essentially argued: Gauguin's "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" (1897-98; owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Paul Cézanne's "Large Bathers" (c. 1900-06; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Matisse's "Bathers by a River," (finished c. 1916-17; Art Institute of Chicago)