Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet)

Painted at Saint-Rémy in January 1890, this copy after Millet's Harrow under Snow belongs to a series of over twenty translations Van Gogh made during his asylum confinement, working from black-and-white engravings of the older artist's compositions because he had no access to the colour originals. He conceived the project explicitly as a homage and as a practical exercise: 'I have tried to do what Millet says he wanted to do with his grain of wheat — I consider it a good thing that the translation is free.' The harrow, a dormant agricultural implement under winter snow, was for him an image of suspended possibility — the potential of the coming season held in abeyance — with particular resonance during his own period of enforced inactivity and uncertain recovery. Van Gogh's translation fundamentally transforms Millet: what had been a study in grey-on-grey tonal restraint becomes, in Van Gogh's hands, a canvas of blues, whites, and warm ochres in which his personal chromatic language completely absorbs the borrowed composition. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh translates Millet's composition into his distinctive vocabulary of directional brushstrokes, the snow field rendered in blues and whites with strokes following the land's contours. The bare harrow is a dark silhouette against the pale field. A brooding winter sky closes the composition from above.