The Drinkers

Painted in 1890, the final year of Van Gogh's life, "The Drinkers" is a copy after a print by Honoré Daumier, made while Van Gogh was a patient at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. The practice of copying works he admired was something Van Gogh returned to repeatedly during this period, treating it not as imitation but as a kind of translation, much the way a musician might interpret another composer's piece. He worked from black-and-white prints and reimagined them entirely in color, which meant the palette was his own invention from start to finish. The result is unmistakably Van Gogh, even though the composition belongs to someone else.

Four hunched figures crowd around a table in a dim, claustrophobic space, their faces slack and weighted with alcohol and exhaustion. There is no romanticizing of the scene. Van Gogh understood poverty and social marginalization firsthand, and his earlier works depicting peasant laborers share this same unflinching attention to human suffering. The brushwork is restless and agitated, with strokes that seem to push against each other, giving the figures a raw, almost feverish energy. At a time when Van Gogh was struggling intensely with his mental health, there is something telling about his choice to revisit this particular subject, four men who have retreated from the world into a bottle.