피에타 (들라크루아 모작)

In the autumn of 1889 Van Gogh was shut inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy, working his way back from a long breakdown. He could not always paint from nature, so he set black-and-white prints in front of him and, as he put it, improvised colour on them. A lithograph of Delacroix's Pietà had fallen into some oil and paint and been ruined, so he made it his own instead, the Virgin cradling the dead Christ against a sky of anxious blues and oranges. It is less a copy than a translation into his own hand. Many have noticed that the red-bearded Christ looks a good deal like Van Gogh himself.