On his deathbed
 of a portrait on the wall, Leiden University, Collection Bilderdijk Museum, [Geerts 22](https://catalogue.leidenuniv.nl/permalink/f/o03ulj/UBL_ALMA11378432520002711)](https://micrio.thingsthattalk.net/czjLz/views/max/733x640.0f898aac-e81d-4fd8-aaf9-804dda2dd1e1.jpg)
Version by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam of a portrait on the wall, Leiden University, Collection Bilderdijk Museum, Geerts 22
Saying goodbye to his dear Leiden was difficult for Bilderdijk. He had wanted to die there but could no longer find a suitable home. He spent the last years of his life in Haarlem, a city he detested. He felt exhausted and longed for death more and more.
His wife died in 1830. Bilderdijk was inconsolable and stared blankly ahead for days on end. In a letter, he wrote: ‘And now I lie there, deprived of her, who only had comfort for me in my lamentation, and see beside me, waning, the only child who ought to comfort me in this state of abandonment.’
On December 18, 1831, during a thunderstorm, he was released from his suffering. The man who once wrote that he longed for death as an infant had reached the respectable age of 75.
Bilderdijk was laid out in the front room of his house on the Grote Markt in Haarlem. The literary scholar Jan Wap described what happened next:
When Bilderdijk was lying there dead, in Haarlem, in his small, one-bedroom bedstead, I opened the green-seaming bed curtains to let [Gerrit Jan] Michaëlis, the painter once more take a seat in front of the great Poet's material surplus.
In this way, Bilderdijk's final appearance could also be immortalized for posterity. Michaelis portrayed him in the traditional way, with the death color on the cheeks and with the characteristic cloth around the head. That same year, the engraver Philippus Velijn made a print on the basis of this painting, which was available at the bookseller Vincent Loosjes and which was widely distributed. In this way, Bilderdijk still literally left his mark, even after his death.