Mattino. Andando al lavoro (da Millet)

Van Gogh made this in the winter of 1889 into 1890, shut inside the asylum at Saint-Remy through weather that kept him from the fields. With no models and little he could paint from life, he turned to a stack of black-and-white prints his brother Theo had sent, after Jean-Francois Millet, the painter of peasants he loved above almost all others. He did not think of it as copying. He compared it to a musician playing another composer's piece, translating Millet's light and shadow into his own language of colour, here a woman on a donkey and a man with a tool on his shoulder heading out at dawn. It belongs to a set he called the Hours of the Day. He had a little over half a year left to live.