Vincent Van Gogh, Prisoners Exercising (1890)
Vincent van Gogh’s story is one of intense beauty and unbearable pain, all wrapped in a two-year period of manic creation and profound despair. By the time he painted Prisoners Exercising in 1890, van Gogh was a man haunted by the madness that defined his last years. It was as though his mind, brilliant and tortured, was constantly at war with itself—a battle that played out on the canvas in bold, frantic strokes of color.
This particular painting, often overshadowed by his more famous works, captures something raw and primal about van Gogh’s experience of life. The prisoners march in a circle, heads down, as if trapped in an endless cycle. It’s a scene of despair, of entrapment—an echo of van Gogh’s own struggle with his mental health. In those last years, he was locked in a different kind of prison, one of his own mind, where the walls closed in tighter with each passing day.
Van Gogh understood his madness in a way that few could. He knew that in the moments between his episodes, he wasn’t insane—he was lucid, almost painfully so. It was in these moments of clarity that he created his most powerful works. But even as he painted, the darkness loomed, a constant companion that would eventually take his life just two years after Prisoners Exercising was completed.
There’s a haunting debate over which painting was van Gogh’s last—a debate fueled by the melancholy and foreboding that seemed to seep into his final works. For years, it was believed that Prisoners Exercising was his final piece, a fittingly bleak end to his tumultuous life. But in truth, van Gogh continued to paint, driven by an almost manic need to capture the world around him, even as his mind unraveled.
Van Gogh’s time in the asylum, where he spent 11 of the last 18 months of his life, was both a sanctuary and a prison. It was a place where he could work, where the act of painting became a lifeline, keeping the madness at bay—at least for a little while. But the darkness was always there, just beneath the surface, and it colored everything he did. His illness was inextricable from his art, and his art was inextricable from his illness.
As we look at Prisoners Exercising, we are not just seeing a scene of men trapped in a cycle of despair. We are seeing van Gogh himself, caught in a relentless loop of creation and destruction, brilliance and madness. It’s a powerful reminder that for van Gogh, art was not just an expression—it was a means of survival. And in the end, it was both his salvation and his undoing.