Weber am offenen Fenster

In 1884 the hand weavers of Brabant were losing. Power looms in the factory towns nearby, Helmond above all, were taking the trade, and a man still working an old wooden loom was paid by the piece for cloth a machine made faster. Van Gogh had moved into his parents' vicarage at Nuenen that winter and kept going back into those cottages, about 10 canvases and a stack of drawings of the same subject. He painted this one in July. The loom takes up most of the room, a heavy oak frame far bigger than the man sitting inside it, and he wrote to his brother Theo about how hard that tangle of beams was to draw. Through the open window stands the old church tower of Nuenen, which was pulled down two years after this.