La Ronde des prisonniers

Van Gogh painted this in early 1890, in the asylum at Saint-Remy where he had committed himself the year before. Shut in and often unable to go outside to paint, he worked from prints other artists had made, and this scene comes from an engraving by Gustave Dore of the exercise yard at Newgate prison in London. The prisoners tramp in a tight circle inside high brick walls, watched from the side. It is hard not to read his own confinement into it. Up near the top, above the grey and blue gloom, he has added two small white butterflies that Dore never drew. He died a few months later, and this was among the works set around his coffin.