At Eternity's Gate

Vincent van Gogh made this painting in May 1890, at Saint-Rémy de Provence, while recovering from a severe relapse in his health. About 2 months later he died, a death generally accepted as suicide. Those two facts frame nearly every discussion of the picture. Set them aside for a moment and look at what the canvas actually shows.

An old man sits on a chair. He leans forward, elbows on knees, fists pressed into his eyes, so the face cannot be seen. That is the whole subject. The canvas measures 81.8 by 65.5 centimetres (2 ft 8 in by 2 ft 2 in), oil paint on canvas, and now hangs at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands under inventory number KM 111.041. Wikidata classes it as genre art, meaning a scene of ordinary life rather than a portrait of a named person or an episode from scripture or history. The man has no name. He stands for a condition, not for himself.

The most important fact about its making is that the design was not new in 1890. Van Gogh based the painting on a lithograph — a print made by drawing on a flat stone, inking the stone, and pressing paper onto it — that he had produced years earlier, during his Dutch period. So the painting is a return to an old idea, not a fresh observation. What he did in May 1890 was translate that black-and-white design into colour and oil paint. Artists repeat their own compositions for many reasons: to sell another version, to fix something that still bothered them, to see what colour does to a design first worked out in black and white. The surviving evidence does not say which reason applied here.

The painting has carried more than one title, and each title steers the viewer. The 1970 catalogue raisonné — a scholarly list that tries to record every known work by an artist — calls it Worn Out: At Eternity's Gate. Elsewhere it is Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate). The two halves of those names pull in different directions. Worn Out describes a body at the end of a working life: exhaustion, labourer's clothes, a plain chair. At Eternity's Gate turns the same body into a man waiting at a door that is not shown. Both readings fit, because the image hides the one thing that would settle the question: the face.

That hiding is how the painting works, and the mechanism is simple. A painted face shows one fixed emotion, and the viewer judges whether the artist got it right. A face covered by the sitter's own fists shows nothing, so the viewer supplies the emotion instead. All the information comes from the body: the curved back, the shoulders lifted towards the ears, the head hanging lower than it would if the man were merely resting. Anyone recognises that posture, because everyone has held it. Van Gogh worked out the arrangement years before this canvas, and clearly thought it worth doing again.

What the painting cannot tell us is Van Gogh's own state of mind in May 1890. The urge to read it as a self-portrait of despair, or a rehearsal for his death that summer, is strong; the facts do not support it. The design is years older than the crisis. The subject is an old man; Van Gogh was 37. And he painted it while convalescing — that is, recovering, on the mend, not in collapse. A picture made during recovery, from a design invented long before, is weak evidence for the painter's feelings at the moment of the brushstroke. It can still move you. It is simply not testimony.