Peasant Woman Bruising Flax (after Millet)

Van Gogh made this in the winter of 1889, shut inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown in Arles. With no models and little freedom to go out, he worked from a black-and-white print after Jean-François Millet, the French painter of peasant life he revered. He thought of these copies as translations, like a musician playing another man's score, taking Millet's grey engraving and deciding every colour himself. The woman beats flax stalks to soften the fibres, an old rural task Millet had drawn decades earlier. Van Gogh made about 20 of these Millet translations during his year there. It hangs now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.