Sorrowing Old Man ('At Eternity's Gate')

Today we present one of Van Gogh’s last paintings, created in May 1890, from the Kröller-Müller Museum. The Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) is based on an early drawing of van Gogh. At this time van Gogh was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health. The lithograph was based on one of a series of studies he made in 1882 of a pensioner and war veteran, Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, at a local almshouse in The Hague. Later, in a rare expression of his own religious feelings, he wrote expressly about this lithograph and two other drawings also posed by Zuyderland: "My intention with these two and with the first old man is one and the same, namely to express the special mood of Christmas and New Year. ... Leaving aside whether or not one agrees with the form, it’s something one respects if it’s sincere, and for my part I can fully share in it and even feel a need for it, at least in the sense that, just as much as an old man of that kind, I have a feeling of belief in something on high even if I don’t know exactly who or what will be there."