Sower, The (after Millet)

Van Gogh made this in 1889, during his year as a patient in the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France. Shut in for long stretches and short of things to paint, he went back to the prints he loved, above all by Jean-Francois Millet, an older French painter of peasant life. He did not treat these as mere copies. He called them translations, the way a musician plays another man's score, and where Millet worked in browns and greys Van Gogh answered in strong colour. The sower crossing the field was a figure he returned to for years. From the asylum he wrote that seeing nothing artistic had left him going flabby, and that work like this revived him.