Aardappelschillende vrouw

By 1916 the war filling the newspapers had turned something as plain as a bowl of potatoes into a daily worry across much of Europe, though the neutral Netherlands stayed out of the fighting. Jo Koster painted this scene that year at Hattem, where she had built herself a house and studio a few years before. Her subject is about as quiet as a subject gets: a woman bent over her work, the peel curling from a potato under her knife. Koster was drawn to these ordinary interiors of simple Overijssel homes, and she worked them up from small strokes of pure colour set side by side, so the light seems to flicker across the cloth and the wall. The canvas reached the Kröller-Müller through her old teacher, H.P. Bremmer, who was also the collector Helene Kröller-Müller's trusted art advisor.