Die ersten Schritte, nach Millet

Van Gogh painted this in January 1890, while he was a voluntary patient in the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France. Stuck indoors through the winter, cut off from the fields he liked to paint, he worked instead from black-and-white photographs his brother Theo mailed him, many after Jean-Francois Millet, an older painter of peasant life he had loved since youth. He did not think of these as mere copies. He called them translations, like a musician playing another man's music, taking the grey photograph and improvising the colour himself. The scene is a small one: a father crouching in a garden, arms open, while his wife steadies their child for its first unsteady steps toward him.