At Eternity's Gate

Vincent van Gogh

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lithography fascinated Van Gogh early in his career, but he made very few prints due to financial constraints. "At Eternity’s Gate" is one of the very rare survivals of his first printmaking campaign during which he produced six lithographs in November 1882. His ambition was to publish a series of thirty prints in order disseminate his work to a broad audience and to earn the attention of magazine editors in the hope of receiving commissions as an illustrator. This print stands out among the group for the spiritual weight the artist attached to it, evoked by the combination of the title with the despairing pose of the model. It remained meaningful to him throughout his career: he brought an impression with him to Paris and went to the trouble of having it framed. Then, in 1890 while in the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he made a painting based on the print (Kröller-Müller Museum). It is the only one of his prints that he copied in oil.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art