The Thresher (after Millet)

Saint-Rémy, September 1889. Van Gogh was a voluntary patient in the asylum of Saint-Paul, and after an attack in July that had stopped him working for weeks he was painting again, indoors, with no models to hand. Theo sent black-and-white prints from Paris, among them the ten sheets of Millet's Travaux des champs, work in the fields. Around 20 September Vincent wrote that seven of the ten were finished, and this thresher is one of them. He refused the word copy. He set the black-and-white in front of him as a subject and improvised colour onto it, the way a musician playing Beethoven adds his own reading. The pose and the barn are Millet's. Every colour here was decided in a room where the source image had none.