The Sheaf-Binder (after Millet)

In September 1889 Van Gogh was a patient at the psychiatric clinic in Saint-Rémy, and the one thing the place could not supply was somebody to sit for him. Figure painting was what he wanted most. His answer was to work from prints, and he asked his brother Theo in Paris to send engravings after Jean-François Millet, the French painter of farm labour he had admired for years. This sheaf-binder comes from a ten-part Millet series called Travaux des champs, work in the fields. Vincent told Theo plainly why he was doing it, writing that since he was ill above all, he was trying to do something to console himself, for his own pleasure. The same method carried him through that autumn and winter, when he painted from prints after Delacroix and Rembrandt in the same way.