The Drinkers

Vincent van Gogh · 1890

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

59.4 × 73.4 cm (23 3/8 × 28 7/8 in.); Framed: 78.9 × 93.3 cm (31 1/16 × 36 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

The Drinkers is one of Van Gogh's most quietly unsettling works — four hunched figures lost in drink, rendered with the raw emotional charge that defined his final year. Painted in February 1890 during his voluntary confinement at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, the work belongs to a remarkable series of colour translations Van Gogh made after black-and-white prints by artists he admired. Rather than slavish copying, he treated these as compositional exercises, imposing his own palette and brushwork onto borrowed forms. The result is unmistakably Van Gogh — the swirling, pressured mark-making, the acid yellows and greens, the sense that the paint itself is under psychological strain. The original source was a lithograph by Honoré Daumier, and Van Gogh's transformation of it into oil is well-documented in his correspondence with Theo, where he described these copies as a way of keeping his hand moving and his mind occupied during recovery. Now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting rewards close looking in ways a print cannot provide. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made on canvas using the same medium Van Gogh worked in, preserving the textural energy and colour relationships that make the original so affecting.