Peasant Woman Raking

In August 1885 Van Gogh was living in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father had been the Protestant minister until his sudden death that spring. Vincent stayed on through the harvest, filling sheets and small canvases with peasants at work in the fields, and this one, barely 38 centimetres tall, belongs to that run. Within weeks the village's Catholic priest told his parishioners to stop sitting for the painter. A young woman Vincent had painted many times was expecting a child and the parish took it for his, which he denied. His supply of models dried up, he turned to landscape instead, and by late November he had left for Antwerp. The canvas itself has stayed in private hands ever since, and the catalogues give it mostly a number, F139.