“When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where [drawings] by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)] were exhibited, I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This is what Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote to his brother, Theo, in June 1875, about one of the artists he revered the most: Jean-François Millet. During his voluntary asylum period in Saint-Rémy de Provence in 1889-1890 — also the last year of his life — van Gogh “translated” at least twenty works of Millet. This particular oil-on-canvas is known by various titles: The Noon, The Siesta, or Rest from Work. It shows a couple — a man and a woman — taking an afternoon nap by a haystack in a field. Painted after van Gogh’s Paris and Arles periods, it carries through some of the traditions of his earlier and more well-known works like Irises, Starry Nights, Yellow House, Sunflowers, etc. In doing these Millet translations — and we’ll get to what exactly “translation” means here — and this painting, in particular, van Gogh aimed to make Millet more accessible and acknowledge how the Impressionist Movement of his time owed a profound debt to the earlier Realist Movement. This timely evocation awakened a new admiration for Millet and created a lasting legacy for van Gogh’s own work.
While copying the works of established, renowned masters was a common, lifelong learning practice for many artists, van Gogh did not simply copy. Instead, he intentionally experimented heavily with more interplays of color and light than in the original works. He discussed this in one of his 182 letters that referenced Millet. Sent from the asylum in January 1890, it is an eloquent, touching letter overall because he also refers to his “insanity,” his health concerns, being locked in, etc.: “So, working either on [Millet’s] drawings or the wood engravings, it’s not copying pure and simple that one would be doing. It is, rather, translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.” In undertaking such experimental translation, as with this particular painting, van Gogh created a bridge between the languages of Realism and Impressionism in specific ways that elevated the originals while advancing his own art.
To develop this translation-bridge with The Siesta, van Gogh infused Millet’s Realist composition, symbolizing 1860s rural France, with the bright colors of the then-popular Impressionist Movement. These changes are typical of van Gogh’s signature style. Note the rich, bright hues of blue, violet, yellow, and orange. There’s also the careful, well-articulated detailing: the sickles lying next to the male figure in the foreground, the blue cart and dappled animals in the background, the gold-brown shadows that add depth to the yellow field, and the various shades of blue and violet that make the noon sky shimmer brightly. Those same blue and violet colors are also mirrored in the peasants’ clothes, completing the chromatic construction he was perfecting in that final phase of his life. In comparison, Millet’s original (from a four-part series called The Four Times of the Day) has the figures reversed and is muted in tone, featuring earthy browns and grays. The other notable difference is that Millet generally showed harvesting being done with brown grain, not yellow hay. In making such changes, van Gogh brought Millet’s gritty, precisely detailed Realism to an entirely new audience, who preferred the Impressionist style with its transient and brighter light and colors, unusual visual angles and effects, subjective points of view, and looser brushwork. As he wrote later in that 1890 letter to Theo:
The more I think about it, the more I find that there’s justification for trying to reproduce things by Millet that he didn’t have the time to paint in oils. […] you’ll clearly see that they were done through a most profound and sincere admiration for Millet. Then, even if they’re criticized one day, or despised as copies, it will remain no less true that it’s justifiable to try to make Millet’s work more accessible to the ordinary general public.
(italics mine)
This “profound and sincere admiration for Millet” caused van Gogh to maintain Millet’s pioneering, elevated, and spiritual view of peasant life. Millet made the so-called “peasant genre” mainstream in his works by depicting peasants as focal points and main subjects rather than peripheral embellishments. He aimed for spiritual meaning in his portrayals and often added a gleaming gold light to his peasant works, making them look almost ethereal, heroic, and blessed. The most well-known examples of this approach are: The Sower (1850), The Gleaners (1857), and The Angelus (1857-1859). In all such works, Millet took figures that had, until then, been relegated to the background and brought them into the spotlight with a solemnity and spiritual resonance that was revolutionary for his time. His use of light, in particular, is what elevated these people from mere laborers to figures of profound dignity and quiet heroism. As a major artist of the Barbizon School of Realism, Millet deviated from his peers in his attention to figures, rather than simply landscapes. [Note: Of these three examples, van Gogh also created his own versions of The Sower and The Gleaners.]
Although the above approach led to mixed reviews and responses during Millet’s lifetime, van Gogh also developed and maintained this reverence and love for the lives of peasants. He was deeply impressed, overall, with what he perceived as their hard-working ethic, single-minded dedication, and acceptance of life as it was given. He found inspiration in and identified with their against-the-odds spirit, and sought to embody similar qualities in his life. So, despite his trademark Impressionist intensity of colors and textures, van Gogh preserved Millet’s contemplative mood through the still visages of the sleeping couple, which are beautifully rendered. By not deviating from Millet’s thematic perspectives on peasant life, van Gogh ensured that his translation was a homage that revived attention in Millet. It is also significant that the work was one of the last three he completed. The quiet and restfulness in this painting probably reflect his own search for these qualities in his troubled life at the time.
One might counter that replacing Millet’s earthy tones, dark shadows, and finely detailed figures with diffuse light, bright colors, and feathery brushstrokes reduces the original work to a frivolous portrayal of a somber, backbreaking reality. In fact, at the time, art galleries across Europe generally refused to exhibit Impressionist works for these reasons. Even the all-powerful Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, France, was displeased that Impressionists like van Gogh were not following their rules and regulations. Art critics ridiculed Impressionism daily in newspapers and magazines. It was, after all, a pivotal, seismic moment of change in the art world with Impressionism as the new upstart tradition.
There can be no better rebuttal to that complaint than the one written by Theo van Gogh to his brother on a letter dated May 1890: “The Millet copies are perhaps the finest things you’ve done and make me believe that big surprises still await us the day you set yourself to doing figure compositions.” (Theo was an art dealer with a reputable European firm, Goupil & Cie. He was instrumental in the popularity of many artists like Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne, Pissarro, Seurat, etc. So, he was indisputably a respected expert in the field despite his potential bias as van Gogh’s brother.)
Sadly, those anticipated figure compositions were not to be. Vincent van Gogh was shot and killed by a mysterious bullet to the chest just two months later. However later that year, fifteen years after Millet’s passing and due to the renewed interest that van Gogh had helped generate, Millet’s The Angelus sold for a record sum of 750,000 Fr. A hundred years after that, in 1990, Van Gogh’s own Portrait du Docteur Gachet— a figure composition that would not have existed if van Gogh had not taught himself figures by doing Millet translations — sold for $83M, the highest price known to date for a van Gogh painting. In 2019, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam had a special exhibition, ‘Millet: Sowing the Seeds of Modern Art,’ which explored “Millet’s later influence on artists ranging from Camille Pissarro to Salvador Dalí.” Van Gogh’s “Millet translations” dominated this exhibition. So, van Gogh’s loving, respectful homage to Millet through carefully composed translations of the latter’s works continues to live on more than a century after his death — something that even van Gogh had likely not dared to hope for.
The enduring legacy of both The Angelus and Portrait du Docteur Gachet, celebrated by critics and cherished in museums, affirms that van Gogh’s tribute to Millet was also a bold reimagining that shaped the very course of modern art. By infusing Millet’s quiet realism with his own electric palette and expressive brushwork, van Gogh bridged the worlds of Realism and Impressionism, honoring the dignity of rural life while inviting new audiences into the sanctity he so deeply felt. Today, this painting dwells at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A framed oil-on-canvas reproduction has also hung on a wall in each of the nine homes I have moved in and out of over the last twenty years or so. It remains a shimmering and timeless reminder of how translation, in any art form, is a way to appreciate and extend our cultural traditions and lineages. In the tranquil repose of the napping peasants, we find the echo of van Gogh’s own restless spirit seeking solace.