Dos cavadores entre árboles

By the time Van Gogh painted this, in late 1889, he had checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the hills of Provence, after the breakdown in Arles. Between attacks he was allowed to paint, and he kept circling back to a subject he had loved since his earliest drawings: people working the land. Here two men bend to dig a tree stump out of the ground, their bodies knotted with the effort. Van Gogh revered the French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who had made peasant labour his life's subject, and in the asylum he copied Millet again and again to steady himself. This is his own version of that world, worked in the restless, curling brushstrokes he had arrived at that year. It hangs now in Detroit.