Digger

In 1885 Van Gogh was living in Nuenen, a Brabant village of weavers and farm workers, and almost everything he drew and painted that year was a person at labour. This is one of those studies, a single peasant bent over his spade, working the ground. He wanted the figure to read as exactly what it was, someone who dug and sweated for a living, so he cared less about a clean finish than about the weight of the body and the coarse working clothes. The colours are the browns and earth tones of the Dutch countryside, before he had ever seen the bright palette of Paris. He made dozens of these figure studies that winter and spring, heads and hands and stooping backs, training himself on the human body doing hard work. This digger comes from the same months as his first ambitious peasant picture, the dark supper scene known as The Potato Eaters.