Bäuerin gräbt vor ihrer Hütte

Van Gogh painted this in Nuenen in June 1885, a few weeks after moving out of the family vicarage. His father, the village minister, had died suddenly that March, and Vincent took two rooms from the Catholic sexton and went out to the heath to work. The cottage is one of the old Brabant houses of mud walls and thatch that he came back to all that year. In October he wrote to his brother Theo that he felt for the brood and the nests, particularly those human nests, the cottages on the heath and the people in them. He had finished The Potato Eaters only weeks before this, in the same village and among the same families, and he was still certain his future lay in painting peasants.