Frau, Garn aufwickelnd

In the winter of 1885 Vincent van Gogh was living with his parents in Nuenen, a Brabant village where many families still worked at hand looms in their cottages. He was building toward one ambitious canvas that would announce him as a painter, and to get there he made study after study of country people absorbed in plain work, sewing, spinning, digging. Here a woman sits by a window winding yarn to be woven, in the dark earthy colours he favoured then. She belonged to the De Groot family, and you meet her again a few months later as the woman pouring coffee in his first major picture, The Potato Eaters.