Vincent van Gogh - At Eternity's Gate Notebook

Sorrowing Old Man / At Eternity's Gate / On the Threshold of Eternity, painted in 1890 in oil on canvas by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Van Gogh returned here to a subject he had first drawn in The Hague in 1882: an elderly man seated with his head buried in his hands. Recovering from another difficult period, he deliberately reworked the old motif in his mature Saint-Rémy style rather than simply copying it. He altered the composition and may have borrowed details such as the chair and stove from his immediate surroundings, turning an early study of grief into a powerful late meditation on human sorrow.