Focus on Sorrow (Van Gogh) and explain the Symbolism.
Sorrow was probably produced in the spring of 1882, between the encounter with Hoornik in January and the birth of her son in July. The drawing was mentioned in a letter to Van Gogh's brother Theo dated 10 April 1882. This dating is supported by the depiction of spring flowers in the foreground. Although the overall feel of the image has been described as bleak, the presence of spring flowers hints at the possibility of redemption. Van Gogh depicts Sien Hoornik as a woman scarred by life, and saw parallels to his own drawings of age-old trees ravaged by nature, such as The Roots in Sandy Ground (Les racines) 1882: "I wanted to express something of life's struggle, both in that white slender female figure and in those gnarled black roots with their knots."The drawing is inscribed with the phrase "Comment se fait-il qu'il y ait sur la terre une femme seule, délaissée?", which translates to "How can there be on earth a woman alone, abandoned?", a quotation from contemporary social historian Jules Michelet's book La Femme. The phrase provides a key to the themes of some of Van Gogh's early works, and his belief in poverty being the root cause of things such as prostitution.
Jules Michelet