Portrait of a One-Eyed Man

Models were hard to come by in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole outside Saint-Rémy, where Van Gogh spent the year from May 1889. A severe attack that autumn left him wary of the other patients for a while, and afterwards he painted two of them. This quick oil sketch is one of the two. He wrote to his mother that once you have been among such people for a time and grown used to them, you stop thinking of them as mad. The sitter's name was never recorded. The museum's title calls him one-eyed, though a 2014 article in a Belgian medical journal argued that the left upper eyelid is hanging closed rather than the eye being gone, and pointed to a nerve-tissue disorder as the likely cause.