Portrait of a Man

When Van Gogh entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole outside Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889, there were 18 men in the male wing. He wrote home that after living among them for a while you stop thinking of them as mad. He also wanted sitters, and sitters were hard to come by in there, so that autumn he painted two of the patients who could hold still.

This is one of the two, an older man, put down quickly and thinly in oils. His name is not recorded. The asylum's admissions register surfaced only a few years ago in a local archive, found by the researchers Martin Bailey and Onelia Cardettini, and it names the men who were shut in with him, though nothing links any of them to this face.

The top left corner of the canvas was damaged not long after it was painted, and nobody knows how.