Schneebedecktes Feld mit einer Egge (nach Millet)

Van Gogh painted this in January 1890, inside the asylum at Saint-Remy where he had admitted himself the year before. After a bad breakdown he had lost his nerve, for a while barely able to go outdoors, and he steadied himself with an exercise beginners use, copying prints. This one follows a print after Jean-Francois Millet, the peasant painter he revered. He kept Millet's frozen field, the abandoned harrow and plough, the birds lifting off at the left, and turned the black-and-white print into colour that was once far sharper than it looks now, since some of his pigments have faded. Within a few months he had left the asylum for the north, where he died that July.