Peasant Woman with a Rake (after Millet)

When Van Gogh first decided to become an artist, back in 1880, one of the first things he did was copy Jean-Francois Millet, the great painter of peasants at work. Nearly ten years later, ill and shut inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, he went back to him. This small canvas of a woman leaning into her rake follows a Millet figure, one of a group he painted from Millet's prints in 1889. Millet had given peasant labour a seriousness usually kept for saints and kings, and that was exactly what drew Van Gogh, who felt a kinship with field workers all his life. He kept the pose Millet set down and poured his own colour and thick, driving brushwork into it. The woman bends to her work under a sky worked in quick strokes of blue and green.