Shepherdess, The (after Millet)

Van Gogh painted this in November 1889, inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown in Arles. Shut in for the winter with no models to pose for him, he worked from black-and-white prints his brother Theo sent, mostly after the peasant painter Jean-François Millet, whom he revered. He made 21 of these. He did not think of them as copies. He called it translating Millet into another language, the language of colour, taking the old master's shepherdess and clothing her in his own blues and yellows. She stands wrapped against the wind, her back to a flock, leaning on a staff, while the man who painted her was living behind a locked door.