Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace

Van Gogh painted this in the village of Nuenen in the spring of 1885, weeks after finishing The Potato Eaters. He was 32, renting a work room from the sexton of the local Catholic church, and chasing a colour he described in his letters as green soap, or a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course. That was praise. He argued with anyone who would listen that peasants had to be painted coarse, and that if a peasant picture smelled of bacon, smoke and potato steam, so much the better. His father, the Protestant minister of the village, had died that March. Later in the year the Catholic priest started telling his parishioners to stop posing for him, and by November Van Gogh had left Nuenen for Antwerp. He never painted in the Netherlands again.