He Made Their Days Vanish Like Breath

‘He made their days vanish like a breath’ Commentary by David Emanuel Cite Share Show Bible Passage Two months before his death in 1890, Vincent van Gogh returned to a sketch from eight years earlier as the inspiration for this painting. The subject was a pensioner and war veteran, and he is depicted here seated in a bare and desolate room. With his head bowed and hands covering his face, the old man seems to shield himself from the outside world—or perhaps from the viewer witnessing his anguish. His posture, reminiscent of an upright foetal position, evokes unfathomable despair. The stark, empty room amplifies the sense of desolation, with no adornments—no pictures, sofas, furnishings—to distract from the haunting solitude of the figure. This painting of the pensioner has often been read as a poignant reflection of Van Gogh’s health struggles at this stage of his life. Perhaps we can see expressed in this picture a profound sense of loneliness that was reflected in the convalescent Van Gogh’s situation. The title, At Eternity’s Gate (which seems originally to have been inscribed by the artist on a lithograph he made from the same early drawing), acquires an additional resonance, given that the artist himself would not live for much longer. Two months after completing the painting, he tragically took his own life, stepping into the eternity evoked by the isolated figure he painted. A comparable reflection of despair emerges in Psalm 77, where the unnamed psalmist endures a night of anguish, tormented by crippling anxiety. Perhaps like the figure in Van Gogh’s painting, he suffers alone, refusing comfort. For the psalmist, the most heartrending aspect of his anguish is a sense of divine abandonment. Feeling forsaken by his only refuge and hope, he laments that God has forgotten to be gracious and has withdrawn his compassion (v.9). Yet, in the depths of despair, the psalmist clings to a thread of hope: the memory of God’s mighty deeds and past acts of deliverance for his forefathers. And we might recall that in Van Gogh’s first encounter with the old man, when he drew him eight years earlier, the artist had likewise found grounds for hopefulness, wanting ‘to express the special mood of Christmas and New Year’ in his study of him, and finding in the process ‘a feeling of belief in something on high even if I don't know exactly who or what will be there’ (Letter 294). References Chilvers, Ian. (ed.). 2004. The Oxford Dictionary of Art, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 297–299. Hulsker, Jan. 1980. The Complete Van Gogh (Oxford: Phaidon) Van Gogh, Vincent. 1882. ‘Letter to Theo van Gogh (#294), The Hague, approx. 13–18 December 1882’, https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/highlights/letters/294 [accessed 22 May 2025] Van Gogh Gallery, n.d. ‘At Eternity’s Gate’, available at https://www.vincentvangogh.org/at-eternitys-gate.jsp [accessed 2 September 2024]