Van gogh mailman series#

Vincent van Gogh suffered from some form of mental illness, acutely during the last two years of his life. Rey disliked his portrait and gave it away. Genesis Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey (F500, JH1659), oil on canvas 1889, Pushkin Museum. It demonstrates that even in his deepest moments of sorrow and pain, Van Gogh clung to a faith in God and eternity, which he tried to express in his work. Certainly, the work would convey an image of total despair had it not been for the English title Van Gogh gave it, At Eternity's Gate. Bent over with his fists clenched against a face hidden in utter frustration, the subject appears engulfed in grief. Near the end of his life Van Gogh recreated this image in oil, while recuperating in the asylum at St. Executed at The Hague in 1882, it depicts an old man seated by a fire, his head buried in his hands. Writing about At Eternity's Gate in 1998, the American theologian Kathleen Powers Erickson remarked: īelief in a 'life beyond the grave' is central to one of van Gogh's first accomplished lithographs, At Eternity's Gate. The Van Gogh Museum had previously been aware of the existence of the study for some time. In 2021, a drawing in a private collection in the Netherlands since 1910 was authenticated as a preliminary study for the original pencil drawing Worn Out by the Van Gogh Museum and put on display. The same theme is taken up again in two later 1883 studies of a seated woman. Seven impressions of the lithograph are known, of which one is annotated At Eternity's Gate. Leaving aside whether or not one agrees with the form, it's something one respects if it's sincere, and for my part I can fully share in it and even feel a need for it, at least in the sense that, just as much as an old man of that kind, I have a feeling of belief in something on high even if I don't know exactly who or what will be there. My intention with these two and with the first old man is one and the same, namely to express the special mood of Christmas and New Year. Later, in a rare expression of his own religious feelings, he wrote expressly about this lithograph and two other drawings also posed by Zuyderland, of an old man reading a Bible and saying grace ( below) respectively: This is far from all theology-simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to. At the same time something precious, something noble, that can't be meant for the worms. I was trying to say this in this print-but I can't say it as beautifully, as strikingly as reality, of which this is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror-that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of 'something on high' in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work. Van Gogh's first attempt at the lithograph followed just two days later. What a fine sight an old working man makes, in his patched bombazine suit with his bald head. I did it of Schuitemaker once and always kept the drawing, because I wanted to do it better another time. Today and yesterday I drew two figures of an old man with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The inspiration for Worn Out was Hubert von Herkomer's Sunday at the Chelsea Hospital, an immensely popular print depicting an old war veteran slumped dead that went on to become an acclaimed painting at the Royal Academy, The Last Muster, that Van Gogh had seen in 1875 when in England.

Van gogh mailman series#

The lithograph was based on a pencil drawing Worn Out, one of a series of studies he made in 1882 of a pensioner and war veteran, Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, at a local almshouse in The Hague and itself a reworking of a drawing and watercolour he had made the previous year. In the 1970 catalogue raisonné, it was given the title Worn Out: At Eternity's Gate.

The painting was completed in early May at a time when he was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health some two months before his death, which is generally accepted as a suicide.

Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh that he made in 1890 in Saint-Rémy de Provence based on an early lithograph.