Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes

In April 1885 Van Gogh was living in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch province of Brabant, in rooms he rented from the sexton of the Catholic church. His father, the local Protestant minister, had died at the end of March, and he kept working straight through it. These were the same weeks he was painting The Potato Eaters, and the same cottage families lent him his models. Planting season on that thin sandy soil meant days spent bent double, and he built the two figures out of the same dark earth colours as the field, so that the backs and the hands carry the whole picture. He wanted peasants who looked like they had grown out of the ground they were digging, and he said as much in his letters to his brother Theo. The canvas is small, roughly 33 by 41 centimetres, worked quickly and out in the fields.