At Eternity’s Gate 1890

"At Eternity’s Gate" is one of the last works by Vincent van Gogh, painted while he was an inmate at an asylum in Saint-Rémy. The image depicts an old man, slumped on a chair, his face buried in his hands. We see his worn work boots and the simple wooden chair he’s sitting on. Painted at a time when the idea of the “deserving poor” was central to social and political debates, Van Gogh here asks us to confront our own feelings about age, poverty, and mental illness. Van Gogh wrote of this work: "…it is perhaps not cheerful, but I did not set out to express cheerfulness." The painting is based on an earlier lithograph, "Worn Out", which Van Gogh made after spending time in the Borinage, a coal-mining region of Belgium. It was there that he ministered to impoverished miners and their families and began to find his calling as an artist. "At Eternity’s Gate" echoes the artist’s life-long commitment to representing the lives of working-class people. It is a raw and unflinching look at human suffering.