Peasant Woman Laundering

August 1885, in the Brabant village of Nuenen. Van Gogh had finished The Potato Eaters that spring and spent the summer on the villagers at their work, reaping, digging, lifting potatoes. On the 18th of that month he wrote to his friend the painter Anthon van Rappard that he took a lot of trouble to get action into his figures, being occupied, doing something. That is what this small canvas is, a woman caught in the middle of her washing.

His models ran out soon after. Following village talk about one of his young sitters, the Catholic priest of Nuenen told his parishioners to stop posing for him, and by the end of November Van Gogh had gone to Antwerp. The picture is about 30 centimetres tall and hangs today in Takayama, in the mountains of central Japan.