Peasant Making a Basket

In the winter of 1884 into 1885 Van Gogh was living with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen, and he had set himself a plan, to become a painter of peasants. Weaving and basket-making were old trades there, done alone indoors through the cold months, and Vincent kept visiting the workers' cottages to draw and paint them at their craft. This basket-maker is one of a long line of such studies, all in the heavy browns and earth tones he thought honest to the life he was watching. Years afterward he wrote that a basket-maker often spends whole seasons nearly alone with his work. That run of peasant heads and hands led straight into the first painting he was truly proud of, The Potato Eaters, finished that spring.