Peasant Woman by the Fireplace

In the spring of 1885 Van Gogh had just finished The Potato Eaters in the Brabant village of Nuenen, and he did not leave the subject behind. Through May and June he kept going back into the same kind of cottage, a single room with a hearth, a kettle and a couple of rush chairs, and painting the women who worked there. Here a woman sits by the fire with a basket in her lap, and the only real light in the room is the small flame under the kettle. That April he had written to his brother Theo that a peasant painting could smell of bacon, smoke and potato steam, and that this was no bad thing. The canvas later belonged to H. P. Bremmer, a Dutch teacher and critic who did much to make Van Gogh known in the Netherlands, and in 1988 it passed to the French state from the heirs of the Paris collector Georges Renand.