Peasant Woman Seated Before an Open Door, Peeling Potatoes

Through the winter of 1884 into 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, Van Gogh painted dozens of studies of local farm workers, small canvases like this one of a woman peeling potatoes in a doorway. He was building toward his first ambitious picture, The Potato Eaters, which he began that April. The darkness here is deliberate. He wanted these works to have the color of a good dusty potato, and wrote that a peasant painting should smell of bacon and smoke, not of perfume. So the room stays brown and close, and the strongest light is the plain daylight from the open door, falling on her hands and the bowl. This was painted five years before the yellows and blues most people picture when they think of him, and before he had ever seen Paris.