Farmhouse with a Stooping Peasant-woman in a Blue Dress

In the summer of 1885 Van Gogh was still in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister, and he spent it painting the people who worked the land around him. This is that world: a low farmhouse and barn, and a woman bent over her task in a blue dress, laid out across a wide, almost letterbox canvas. The palette is all earth and dusk, the browns and muddy greens he insisted peasant life should be painted in, from the same run of months that produced The Potato Eaters. Paris and its bright color were still a year off. That November he left Nuenen for Antwerp, and these Brabant fields were among the last Dutch subjects he ever painted.