Frau am Tisch

By 1885 Van Gogh was back living with his parents in the Brabant village of Nuenen, and he had set himself a stubborn task, to paint peasants as they really were, in the dim light of their own cottages. This is the year of The Potato Eaters, and the palette here is the same, browns and greys ground down to the colour of earth and old wood. A woman sits at a table near the window, caught mid-task in the working light. He wanted no prettiness in these figures, only the weight of the labour in them. Within a year he would leave for Paris, and this heavy, dark manner of painting would fall away almost completely.