In Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh had worked on a picture named ‘The Reaper’: “For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like a devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with the sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.”