Evening (after Millet)

Jean-François Millet had made a set of four scenes called the four times of the day, morning, noon, evening and night, and the engraver Adrien Lavieille had turned them into cheap black-and-white wood engravings that circulated widely. In October 1889 Van Gogh painted all four of them within a few weeks. This is the evening one. A peasant couple sit under an oil lamp, the woman mending clothes, the husband working on a wicker basket, their child asleep, a cat dozing by the fireplace. The colour is his own choice, soft violets and purples for the lamplit hour, and he described what he was doing as translating the print much as a musician interprets another composer's work. The noon scene from the same set, two harvesters asleep in the straw, hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.