Peasant Woman Bruising Flax (after Millet)

Among the most physically energetic of Van Gogh's Millet copies from Saint-Rémy, this 1889 canvas of a peasant woman bruising flax — beating harvested flax stalks to soften the fibres before spinning — connects the asylum period to the deepest roots of his moral vision as an artist. He had first become serious about painting through his encounter with the Belgian miners and Brabant peasants whose work he attempted to share during his years as a lay preacher, and Millet's images of women at agricultural labour had shown him how such subjects could be elevated to art without sentimentality. At Saint-Rémy, physically separated from the peasant life he had once observed directly, the Millet translations allowed him to remain connected to that world through imagination and brushwork. The vigorous physical action of the flax-bruising — the repeated downward blow — seems to have animated his application of paint with corresponding physical energy. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The figure's active pose is captured in dynamic, curving strokes that follow the motion of flax-bruising. Van Gogh uses warm earth tones — ochres, siennas, and dark browns — appropriate to the agricultural subject. His brushstrokes animate both figure and ground with a unified physical energy.