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Start Your JournalThe Reaper (after Millet)
Personal Reflection
This painting looks to so alive. I can almost hear a song whistle in the background and craws sound. Wind as well. And everything moving slightly in the wind. The Reaper is focused on the work that seams easy if you’re young, but very difficult with age and back pain. The position and the way he bands… Why the tool design doesn’t help with that and make the work a bit less painful?
About This Artwork
Van Gogh painted this while confined at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, as part of a series of copies after Jean-François Millet, the French painter he idolized above almost all others. Millet had made the peasant laborer a subject worthy of monumental treatment, and Van Gogh absorbed that deeply. But these weren’t passive copies. Van Gogh worked from black-and-white engravings and translated them entirely into his own color and texture, essentially improvising from a score. The reaper bent double over the grain, birds scattering overhead, is painted with that compressed, urgent brushwork that characterizes the Saint-Rémy period. Historically significant because this series represents Van Gogh’s most sustained engagement with artistic inheritance - how you take what you love and make it yours. What’s interesting: Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that he saw the reaper as a figure of death, but one working in full daylight, without anguish. A gentle death. He found that consoling.
- Artist
- Vincent van Gogh
- Location
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Date experienced
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