Peasant Burning Weeds

In October 1883 Van Gogh was in Drenthe, the peat country of the northeastern Netherlands, and had been there about three months. On 22 October he wrote to his brother Theo, sketched this scene into the letter, and said he had caught the weed burner better this time in the tone of it, so that the study gave more of the vastness of the plain and the falling dusk. The small fire with its wisp of smoke is the only point of light in the picture. Of the 18 or so studies he made in Drenthe most are lost, and five paintings from those weeks are known today. This is one of them, and it took a long route back. It changed hands close to 20 times, passing through the Dutch poet Herman Gorter and the Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose stock was taken over during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Early in 2019 it was restituted to Goudstikker's heirs, and that November the Van Gogh Museum and the Drents Museum in Assen bought it together at auction in New York for 3.1 million dollars, several times the estimate. It was the Van Gogh Museum's first purchase of a painting by him since 1977, and the two museums show it in turn.