Sulla soglia dell'eternità

Van Gogh painted this in May 1890, in the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France, in the last months of his life. But the old man in the chair, head in his fists, wasn't invented there. Eight years earlier, living in The Hague, Van Gogh had drawn a pensioner and war veteran from a local almshouse, an old man named Zuyderland, and turned that drawing into a print he titled Worn Out. Now, closed inside the asylum and painting from his own earlier work because he couldn't always go outside, he went back to that figure and gave it colour for the first time. He built the man out of blues and greens, the same restless brushwork he was using on the fields and cypresses. He had written years before that he found in a broken old workman's figure something of eternity. He would leave Saint-Rémy that same month and be dead within about ten weeks.