The old man no longer likes to see the world with its unreasonable demands: his life has driven him to the verge of exhaustion, perhaps even despair.
The bald man sits leaning forward on a chair, his eyes are covered by his fists, his elbows are resting on his knees in dark dungarees.
Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are certain: this picture of an underprivileged and easily overlooked picture, captured in pencil on paper, is a work by Vincent van Gogh.
Beginnings of an exceptional artist
Teio Meedendorp, one of the researchers at the museum, speaks of a “spectacular” discovery that shed light on Van Gogh's artistic beginnings in The Hague. The sheet, measuring 48.8 by 30 centimeters, was previously in a Dutch private collection and is very similar to a drawing that the museum already owns, a lithograph by Van Gogh in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and a painting from 1890 in Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
Van Gogh's now discovered drawing was created in 1882 when he was creating dark landscape paintings and also concentrating on studies of people. These included residents of a retirement home, to whom he paid a small fee for the meetings. The name of the man in dungarees is well known: his name was Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland. Van Gogh held it in strong strokes with the help of a carpenter's pencil and brightened some areas of the drawing by rubbing breadcrumbs over them. He used a mixture of water and milk for fixation. In a letter to his brother Theo from November 1882, Vincent van Gogh apparently describes the work on the drawing, which is now in the hands of the museum in Amsterdam and which enriches the exhibition there from this Friday on.