Peasant Making a Basket

In 1885 Van Gogh was living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, in his father's parsonage, and painting the people around him: weavers at their looms, peasants at supper, hands roughened by work. He had not yet seen the bright color of Paris or the south. His palette here is all browns and earth, and deliberately so, because he believed that was the honest color of country labor. The man sits bent over his task, twisting willow rods into a basket, his face barely lifted from the work. It comes from the same months as The Potato Eaters, the dark picture of a peasant family sharing their meal that Van Gogh regarded as his first true painting.