Peasant Woman with a Rake (after Millet)

Van Gogh's Peasant Woman with a Rake after Millet continues his Saint-Rémy practice of translating Barbizon compositions into his own chromatic language — a practice he described as both homage and interpretation, similar to the way a musician might perform another composer's score. The raking woman — gathering cut material from a field — was a quintessential Millet subject: repetitive physical labor, the body engaged in the rhythmic motion of a simple task, the human figure small against the landscape that surrounds and dwarfs her. Van Gogh identified with these figures on both moral and personal grounds: they represented his conviction that physical labor was as dignified as intellectual work, and at Saint-Rémy, confined and often unable to exercise creative control over his own painting, the images of purposeful physical activity may have carried therapeutic as well as artistic significance. His translation adds warm-cool complementary contrasts that transform Millet's cool monochrome into a Provençal color world, the figure now in a landscape of Van Gogh's own making even as the composition remains faithful to the original. The work's current unlocated status means it is known primarily through the catalogue raisonné documentation.

Van Gogh's version of the raking woman brings Millet's figure into his own coloristic world — warm earth tones and cooler sky in his characteristic complementary relationship. The figure's posture of raking is translated faithfully while every surface receives his Saint-Rémy energy. The background landscape is handled more freely than the figure.