Vincent Van Gogh (Sorrowing old man)

Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 48x58cm
Owned by: Private collection.

Sorrowing old man is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh that he cade in 1890 in Saint-Rémy de Provence based on an early lithograph.

The painting was completed in early May at a time when he was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health some two months before his death, which is generally accepted as a suicide.

The lithograph was based on a pencil drawing worn out, one of a series of studies he made in 1882 of a personer and war veteran, Adrianus Jacobus Zuyder land, at local aleshouse in The Hague and itself a reworking of a drawing and watercolor he had made the previous year. The inspiration for Worn Out was Hubert von er 's Sunday at the Chelsea Hospital, an imensely popular print depicting an old war veteran slumped dead that went on to become an acclaimed painting at the Royal Academy. The Last Muster, that Van Gogh had seen in 1875 when in EnglandVan Gogh wrote of his drawing: "Today and yesterday I drew two figures of an
old man with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I did it of chuitemaker once and always kept the drawing because I wanted to do it better another in his patched bombazine suit with his bald head.
Perhaps I'll also do a lithograph of it. what a fine sight an old working man makes It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work.

Van Gogh's first attempt at the lithograph followed just two days later. He wrote: I was trying to say this in this print but I can't say it as beautifully as strikingly as reality of which this is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of something on high' in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of
God and an eternity is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as This is far from all quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time something precious something moble. thut can't be meant for the wortheology simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter heath farmer or siner can have moments of emotion and wood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to Later, in a rare expression of his own religious feelings. he wrote expressly about this lithograph and two other drawings also posed by Zuyder land,
of an old man reading a Bible and saying grace (below) respectively: "The intention with these two and with the first old man is one and the same, namely to express the special wood of Christmas and New Year.

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