Fritz von Uhde was thirty-seven when he painted this interesting picture, Man Putting on His Coat. I'm thinking this scene was not a figment of the artist's imagination, but the capturing of a moment in which the man, who may have sat as a model for the artist, got up to leave. Notice the heavily framed painting and other canvases and papers for sketches on the steps against the studio's windowed-wall. He is a poor man — his coat is frayed as is the underneath jacket he's already wearing. He's neither an old man nor a youngster, but he has a very distinctive face.
Notice the chair on the right behind the man. Maybe it's the chair the fellow had sat on as he modeled for the artist. It's the kind of chair we have seen in other von Uhde paintings, of lower class houses and apartments of the poor. It's the same kind of chair Vincent van Gogh painted a few years later in December of 1888: a rustic wooden straight-backed, armless chair, with a woven straw seat on a clay-tiled floor. Van Gogh intended his painting to be a kind of self-portrait. Even though he painted his chair in bright colors and sunlight, there is a sadness to the painting — he is absent having, left behind his pipe and tobacco pouch on the seat. So a chair of any kind can reflect a variety of feelings and senses.
During Lent we're on our way forward to Easter, but the Christian looks backward at the same time — looking back to Jesus in his desert fasting, back to the Last Supper, back to the way of Calvary and the cross, back to the myrrh bearing women of Easter Morning. Can I think back over my life to those moments which stand out, as if frozen. Moments which are particularly beautiful, or where I was being shown or taught something—moments which I would say in hind sight were meaningful. Perhaps they are moments in which God revealed something of himself to me, or when I realized something especially good or deeply human.
Perhaps in this frozen moment when the man put on his coat to leave, the artist may have felt a deep gratitude for this man's presence in his life. Maybe he had come to know the man's story in the long hours they spent together in the studio. Perhaps he had come to know his family and their struggle or sensed his goodness, helping him to become an artist whose paintings are heart felt.
