Mittagsrast (nach Millet)

Van Gogh painted this in the winter of 1889 into 1890, shut inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he had checked himself in after the breakdown in Arles. Cut off from live models and open fields, he worked from prints his brother Theo sent him, and this one copies a drawing by Jean-François Millet of two peasants asleep in the noon shade of a haystack. Van Gogh kept Millet's composition almost exactly, down to the sickles and the pair of clogs in the foreground. What he added was colour. He told Theo he was translating Millet's black-and-white into another language, building the whole field of rest out of blue and violet against yellow and orange. The two harvesters sleep through the hottest part of the day, the work paused around them.