Evening - The Watch (after Millet)
Appreciation
Evening - The Watch (after Millet) Nederland Vincent van Gogh Gallery and Appreciation
Like the painting First Steps, the painting Night or Evening: The Watch depicts happy life of a rural family: father, mother and child. Here the image seems bathed in yellow light like that of the Holy Family. A lamp casts long shadows of many colors on the floor of the humble cottage. The painting includes soft shades of green and purple. The work was based on a print by Millet from his series, the four times of day.
Van Gogh Museum says of Millet's influence on Van Gogh: "Millet's paintings, with their unprecedented depictions of peasants and their labors, mark a turning point in 19th-century art. Before Millet, peasant figures were just one of many elements in picturesque or nostalgic scenes. In Millet's work, individual men and women became heroic and real. Millet was the only major artist of the Barbizon School who was not interested in 'pure' landscape painting."
Theo wrote Van Gogh: "The copies after Millet are perhaps the best things you have done yet, and induce me to believe that on the day you turn to painting compositions of figures, we may look forward to great surprises."