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Van Gogh's Prison Court, painted in the St. Rémy asylum (where he voluntarily committed himself in 1889 after he slashed his ear), is copied from a Gustave Doré engraving. But despite its somber mood, it shows no shortening of Van Gogh's great talent. In one of his last works, After the Rain, painted less than two months before Van Gogh shot himself at the onset of another epileptic attack, he shows that until the end he could be moved by "the immeasurable plain with cornfields against the hills, immense as a sea . . ."
After painting After the Rain, Van Gogh, soon to die, wearily stated the problem underlying all efforts to explain painters in words or on celluloid: "The truth is, we can only make our pictures speak."