Vincent van Gogh

(probably) Jacques Hageraats, The Hague

L.C. Enthoven, Voorburg (probably acquired from the above in the 1900s. Sold: Fred Muller & Co., Amsterdam, 18th May 1920, lot 252)

M.S. de Jong, Amsterdam (purchased at the above sale)

A.P. de Jong, Johannesburg (by descent from the above)

E. Rogoff, Johannesburg (sold: Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 10th May 1984, lot 78)

Purchased at the above sale by the parents of the present owners

Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi, L'Impressionismo a l'età di Van Gogh, 2003, no. 128, illustrated in the catalogue

Jacob Baart de la Faille, L'Œuvre de Vincent van Gogh, Catalogue raisonné, Paris & Brussels, 1928, vol. III, no. 987, catalogued p. 39; vol. IV, no. 987, illustrated pl. XLI

Walther Vanbeselaere, De Hollandsche periode in het werk van Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, 1937, pp. 91, 170, 192 & 409

Jacob Baart de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh, His Paintings and Drawings, London, 1970, no. F987, illustrated p. 367

Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh. Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, New York, 1980, no. 303, illustrated p. 75 (as dating from December 1882 - January 1883)

Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh. Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, New York, 1984, no. 303, illustrated p. 75 (as dating from December 1882 - January 1883)

Jacob Baart de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Works on Paper. Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco, 1992, vol. I, no. 987, catalogued p. 39; vol. II, no. 987, illustrated pl. XLI

Jan Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh, Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, Amsterdam, 1996, no. 303, illustrated p. 75 (as dating from 1883)

Executed in 1882, the present work is a wonderfully evocative drawing of an elderly miner walking through the streets at night - whether setting out to work before sunrise or returning home in the dark we cannot know. The figure trudges towards the viewer as if frozen in time, his pick axe resting heavily on his shoulder, lost in his reverie and seemingly unaware of the observer. Van Gogh's first encounter with coal miners and their families was in 1879 when he arrived in Borinage, a bleak coal-mining district near Mons, as a Protestant missionary and preacher. Upon his arrival in the village of Warmes he wrote to his brother Theo: 'It's a sombre place, and at first sight everything around it has something dismal and deathly about it. The workers there are usually people, emaciated and pale owing to fever, who look exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old [...]. All around the mine are poor miners’ dwellings with a couple of dead trees, completely black from the smoke, and thorn-hedges, dung-heaps and rubbish dumps, mountains of unusable coal. [Dutch painter Jacob] Maris would make a beautiful painting of it' (quoted in Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten & Nienke Bakker (eds.), Vincent van Gogh. The Letters, New York, 2009, vol. I, letter no. 151, p. 239).  

Van Gogh was just 26 years old and his experience living amongst the impoverished community affected him deeply. Inspired by their stoicism and in a bid to ease the burden of their lives, Van Gogh sought to abolish all distance between himself and his suffering neighbours, choosing to give away all his possessions and sleeping as they did on the floor of a hut. The Church strongly disapproved of what they deemed his excessive asceticism and Van Gogh was dismissed from his post after only six months. It was at this moment that Van Gogh discovered his true vocation as an artist, however, deciding to remain in the area for several more months to hone his skills as a draughtsman by drawing the miners and their families and chronicling the harsh conditions of their lives. He wrote to Theo: 'it was in this extreme poverty that I felt my energy return [...]. I couldn’t tell you how happy I feel to have taken up drawing again' (quoted in ibid., letter no. 158, p. 256).

The empathy Van Gogh had felt for his models in these early, almost primitive, Borinage works is echoed in all of the artist’s subsequent portraits of working men and women. Although the drawings became increasingly refined and emotion-laden, his subjects remained dignified and never sentimentalised. When Van Gogh took up the theme of miners again in October 1882 with drawings such as the present work, he was in fact living in The Hague and far from the coal mines themselves. His subject here is recognisable by his distinctive white whiskers as Adrianus Zuyderland, one of the artist’s favourite models who lived in an almshouse nearby. A deaf, seventy-two-year-old pensioner, Zuyderland had small, heavy-lidded eyes, a hooked nose, and a bald pate; tufts of unruly white hair stuck out above his large, protruding ears, and dense mutton-chop whiskers covered his cheeks. ‘I'm very busy with drawings of an orphan man, as the almsmen are usually called here,’ Van Gogh wrote to Anthon van Rappard. ‘Don’t you think that the expressions orphan man and orphan woman are just right?’ (quoted in ibid., vol. II, letter no. 268, p. 164). Throughout the autumn and winter, Zuyderland came to Van Gogh’s studio as often as he could. The artist never tired of drawing the old man’s worn visage, irrevocably marked by adversity and sorrow; finally he had found a model commensurate to his boundless capacity for drawing. In some drawings, Van Gogh depicted Zuyderland standing proud and defiant; in others, the old man cradles his head in his hands in utter defeat. More often, however, Van Gogh captured his model in the midst of humble daily activities, poignant in their very predictability.

It was after some experimentation with lithography in November 1882, that Van Gogh began to draw with lithographic crayons directly on paper. He even went back to work over older pencil drawings to add strength to expressive contours and a rich lustre to the shadows, as is believed to be the case in the present work, before applying highlights of opaque white watercolour. Remarkable for its striking monochrome palette with strong contrasts of light and dark, Man with an Axe on his Shoulder thus reveals the artist at his most psychologically poignant and technically sophisticated.