Cottage with Peasant Woman Digging

Van Gogh painted this in June 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, about a month after he finished The Potato Eaters. This was his peasant period, before Paris and before the bright colour everyone now pictures. Here everything is the brown of earth and thatch, a low cottage settling into the land, a woman bent over her spade in front of it. He admired the older French painter Millet, who had made farm labour his lifelong subject, and he wanted to catch the same hard closeness between country people and the ground they worked. Van Gogh liked to call these huts nests, as though the people had built them the way birds do. The painting is now in Japan, at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.