The Sower (after Millet)

By the time Van Gogh painted this, in the autumn of 1889, he was living inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy, recovering from a breakdown that had cost him weeks of work. With no models to pose and few motifs he could reach, he turned to a stack of prints his brother Theo had sent, among them Jean-François Millet's sower of 1850. Van Gogh didn't call this copying. He called it translation, taking Millet's earthy black-and-white figure and rendering it in colour, the way a musician plays another composer's score. Behind the sower's broad arm the ripe corn is already standing, so the sowing and the harvest share one field. He would leave the asylum a few months later.