Vincent Van Gogh’s mirrored copy of Eugène Delacroix’s Good Samaritan currently hanging in Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands is an oil on canvas, measuring 73 cm x 60 cm.
On May 8, 1890, exhausted, ill, and out of control, Vincent Van Gogh committed himself to St. Paul’s psychiatric asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, a small hamlet in the south of France. A former monastery, the sanitarium was located in an area of cornfields, vineyards and olive trees. There Van Gogh was allowed two small adjoining cells with barred windows. One room he used as his bedroom, and the other was his tiny studio. While there, Van Gogh not only painted the surrounding area and the interior of the asylum, but he also copied paintings and drawings by other artists, making those paintings his own through modifications he made to the painting’s composition, the colours and, of course, the brush strokes.
Van Gogh had become so difficult, so sick that the townspeople of Arles, where he had been living and painting had given him the name “the red-headed madman.”
After a psychotic break during the visit of fellow artist Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh was all but put out of the town. However, with the help of a couple of people, he eventually made his way to the sanitarium in St Remy de Provence where he copied and modified Delacroix’s painting of The Good Samaritan.
The ‘Good Samaritan’ parable told by Jesus (Luke 10) was not lost on Van Gogh, and perhaps his way of expressing gratitude to those who helped him in his time of need.
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