First Steps, after Millet

Van Gogh painted this scene of a child taking its first steps in January 1890, during the final months of his stay at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy. He was copying a print by Jean-Francois Millet, one of 21 copies he made that winter, and he described the process in a letter to his brother Theo as 'a translation into another language, the language of color.' The canvas is roughly square, 28 by 36 inches. A father crouches in a garden, arms outstretched, encouraging a small child to walk toward him. The mother stands behind, bent forward, ready to catch the child if it falls. The garden is painted in thick, rolling strokes of green and blue, with a spade stuck in the earth at the left and a wheelbarrow at the right. The sky is a pale, washed blue. The figures are heavy and grounded, painted in warm earth tones that contrast with the cool greens of the garden. Van Gogh admired Millet throughout his life. Millet's images of rural laborers, painted in the 1850s and 1860s, had become icons of the French countryside, and Van Gogh saw in them a dignity that he wanted to carry into his own work. He made his first copies of Millet in 1889, during the months when his illness kept him indoors. He could not paint from models, so he worked from black-and-white prints, adding his own color and brushwork to Millet's compositions. The copies are not reproductions. Van Gogh changed the proportions, intensified the colors, and rebuilt the surfaces with his own thick impasto. In First Steps, he transformed Millet's somber, monochromatic original into a painting full of light and movement. The garden, which in Millet is a flat backdrop, becomes a living surface of color. The figures, which in Millet are static, seem to lean and breathe. Oil on canvas, 72 by 91 centimeters. Van Gogh painted with his characteristic heavy impasto, building the garden in thick ridges of green and yellow. The figures are painted more smoothly, with careful modeling in the faces and hands. The contrast between the turbulent background and the calm figures gives the painting its emotional tension. The warm greens and blues make this print work well in a family room, a nursery, or a sunroom. The subject of a child's first steps is tender and domestic, and it suits rooms with plants, natural light, and informal furniture. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the figures enough room to read. The composition is dense with detail, so a larger print rewards close viewing. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1964, gifted by George N. and Helen M. Richard. It is one of several Van Gogh copies after Millet in the Met's collection. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.