牝牛

Van Gogh painted these cows in July 1890, in the last weeks of his life, at Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris. He was not working from a field. His doctor there, Paul Gachet, was an amateur printmaker, and Van Gogh copied the animals from an etching Gachet had made years earlier after a study of cows by the Flemish master Jacob Jordaens. Copying old pictures was something Van Gogh did to steady himself when he could not face new subjects, turning another man's composition into his own thick, restless paint. He died later that same month. The canvas is not counted among his great works, and its authenticity was even doubted for a time, until examinations in the 1990s confirmed his hand.