Pietà

In the autumn of 1889 Vincent van Gogh was a voluntary patient in the asylum at Saint-Remy, in southern France, kept indoors between his attacks and short of anything to paint from life. So he worked from prints he kept in his room. This one started with an accident. A lithograph of Delacroix's Pieta slipped into his oil paints and was ruined, and he wrote to his brother Theo that he would remake it in colour instead. Religious pictures were rare for him, the son of a Dutch pastor who had walked away from the church. But look at the dead Christ, gaunt, with a red beard and reddish hair. Viewers have long recognised van Gogh's own face in it, painted in the year before he died.