Due contadine che scavano in un campo innevato

Van Gogh painted this in the first months of 1890, in the asylum at Saint-Remy where he had committed himself. He was recovering from a long, frightening relapse and could not always go outside, so he worked from memory and from prints, turning back to the cold northern country of his childhood. The two bent figures digging in the snow come from Jean-Francois Millet, whose peasant scenes Van Gogh had loved for years. He did not think of these as mere copies. He compared working from Millet to a musician playing another man's Beethoven, an interpretation rather than a theft. The paint is dense and the field almost bare, a strip of snow under a heavy sky. He would leave Saint-Remy that May and be dead by the end of July.