Van Gogh's Copies after Millet
In the asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the autumn and winter of 1889, Van Gogh began turning Jean-François Millet's prints of peasant life into paintings of his own.
Looking for a painting that is not on this page? Search it by title. If it’s public domain, we paint it.
About the series
Millet had been his model from the start: in his first years as an artist Van Gogh copied Millet's Labours of the Fields again and again to learn to draw figures. Shut indoors through a cold winter with few subjects, he asked Theo to send black and white reproductions of Millet's work and painted around twenty copies in colour.
He did not think of it as copying. In a letter to Theo he compared it to a musician playing a piece by another composer: the drawing was Millet's, the colour and the brushwork his own. Noon Rest, a couple asleep in the shade of a haystack, is in the Musée d'Orsay. First Steps, a father kneeling with open arms as a child walks towards him, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The figure paintings, such as The Sower and The Reaper, share the strong yellows and blues of his landscapes from the same months and hang well beside them.
