Seventeen copies after Millet

The record dates Sheaf-Binder, The after Millet to 1889. Seventeen titles in this catalogue name Millet, thirteen of them dated 1889 and four dated 1890. Copying after another painter is a working practice the record registers in the titles themselves, and in this catalogue it is confined almost entirely to the last two periods: not one title before 1889 names Millet.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 44.5 by 32 centimetres, a small upright, and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds twenty-two of the 116 works dated 1889. The measured palette reads as ochre and yellow.

After, as a category

Twenty-three titles in the catalogue contain the word after in the sense of a copy: seventeen after Millet, two after Rembrandt, one after Delacroix, one after Daumier, one after Demont-Breton and one after Kesai Eisen, that last dated 1887. Fifteen of the twenty-three are dated 1889. A catalogue arranged by period shows that concentration immediately; one arranged by subject would scatter these across reapers, sowers and shepherdesses and lose the fact that they belong together. Why the copies cluster where they do is not something the record answers.