“The Raising of Lazarus (After Rembrandt)”, Vincent Van Gogh, May 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
On 27th July 1890, the artist Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He survived the shot but the wound became infected and he was dead within 48 hours. He was only 37. He left behind him 2,100 works of art including 860 oil paintings, most of which dated from the last two years of his life. Vincent had been staying at Auvers-sur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris, having left an asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence the previous May. While he was in the asylum he completed a number of paintings including his famous “Starry Night”. His brother Theo had sent him reproductions of some of his favourite etchings. One of these was Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus” from 1632. He wrote to Theo that these gave him “the desire to climb back up again from the dejected state “ he was in. For his painting he takes the section of the etching which shows Lazarus and his two sisters. He sent a sketch of it to Theo and wrote, “The cave and the corpse are violet, yellow, white. The woman who is taking the handkerchief from the resurrected man’s face has a green dress and orange hair, the other has black hair and a striped garment. Green and pink. Behind a countryside, blue hills, a yellow rising sun. The combination of colours would thus itself speak of the same thing expressed by the chiaroscuro of the etching.” He gave Lazarus a red beard, suggesting that he identified himself with him and the sisters have been identified as two women known to him from his time in Arles. He does not show Christ. Instead he has the sun rising over the cornfields around Auvers. It is a painting in which hope is clad in yellow and white and attempts to climb from the violet tinged tomb of human despair.
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