Prisoners Exercising

Prisoners Exercising, also called Prisoners' Round (after Gustave Doré), is an oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh, made in February 1890 at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy; it is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Van Gogh was a patient at the asylum from May 1889 to May 1890. Often unable to work outdoors, he made painted copies after prints by Millet, Rembrandt, Delacroix and Daumier. For this picture he used Gustave Doré's 1872 engraving of the exercise yard at Newgate Prison, made for the book London: A Pilgrimage, working from a wood-engraved reproduction by Héliodore Pisan published in the Dutch magazine De Katholieke Illustratie. Doré showed prisoners being paraded in a circle so that detectives could memorise their faces. Van Gogh told Theo that he found this copy, and one after Daumier's Men Drinking, difficult to carry out.

He changed the model considerably. The back wall is much narrower, so that the yard seems to close in on the ring of men, and Doré's precisely drawn paving and brickwork become restless strokes running in many directions. Cold blues and greens fill the depths of the yard, while warmer touches catch the upper walls, where two small white butterflies flutter. One prisoner at the front, bareheaded and more individual than the rest, turns towards the viewer, and his features have been read as Van Gogh's own. The Pushkin Museum calls it his most tragic painting, an image of his depressed state and loss of freedom.

The canvas measures 80 × 64 cm. After Van Gogh's suicide in July 1890 it was among the works placed around his coffin, and Emile Bernard described it as a picture of terrifying ferocity that was also symbolic of his end. It passed to Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and then through several private collections, including that of Alexandre Berthier, Prince of Wagram, before entering the collection of Ivan Morozov in Moscow. Nationalised after the revolution, it hung in the State Museum of New Western Art until 1948, when it was transferred to the Pushkin Museum.