Peasant Woman, Seated with White Cap

In May 1942, in occupied Amsterdam, the dealers Buffa & Zonen bought this study from the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and before the war ended they sold it on to Galerie Valentin in Stuttgart. After the liberation it was logged at the Allied collecting point for recovered art in Wiesbaden and passed into the care of the Dutch state, which still owns it. Buffa told the Dutch authorities in October 1945 that the sale had been voluntary. State researchers found too little about its owners in the 1930s to say whether anyone lost it under pressure, and no one has ever claimed it. It hangs on loan in 's-Hertogenbosch. The picture itself goes back to Nuenen in 1885, an old woman in her everyday cap on a rush chair, fists resting in her lap, one of Van Gogh's studies for The Potato Eaters.