Virginia Woolf Statue by Laury Dizengremel

In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his own ear, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to a prostitute. A few months later, frightened of himself and of what he might do next, he asked to be admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. He was thirty-six, and he would spend the next year there. In the warmer months he painted the asylum garden, the olive groves, the hills. But winter came, and with it more attacks, and there were long stretches when he could barely go outside. So he painted from prints his brother Theo sent him, black-and-white engravings by artists he loved, and in February 1890 he picked one by Gustave Doré: the exercise yard of Newgate Prison in London. He kept the scene almost exactly as Doré drew it: a ring of men walks in a slow circle on a stone floor, round and round, hemmed in by brick walls that rise so high there's no sky left at the top. What Van Gogh added was color, and he chose the colors of a cold cell: grey-blue, sickly green, a little dull ochre, nothing warm anywhere. The man in the middle of the circle, the tall one without a hat, is the only prisoner whose face catches the light, and the only one who isn't looking at the ground. He's looking out, at you. Many believe he has Van Gogh's own features. There's no proof, but it's hard to look at that face, painted by a man living behind bars of his own, and not wonder... Vincent never thought of these paintings as mere copies, and in a letter to Theo from the asylum, he explained that working from another artist's prints was really "translating into another language, the one of colors." Five months after he finished this one, he was dead.