Peasant Woman Sitting on a Chair

In June 1885 Van Gogh was still in Nuenen, the Brabant village where he had spent the past year and a half painting its farm labourers and weavers. The Potato Eaters, the big supper scene he had been building toward, was finished that spring, and he went on painting local people one at a time. Most of those studies are heads, or figures bent over a task. This woman is doing nothing at all. She sits sideways on a plain wooden chair with her hands folded in her lap, looking away from us, and her green skirt and apron fill most of the lower half of the picture. Full-length figures like this are rare among his Nuenen oils. It is a small work, roughly 33 by 25 centimetres, painted on canvas that was later laid down on a panel. By around 1902, a dozen years after his death, it was with an art dealer in Rotterdam, and it has stayed in private hands ever since, most recently offered at auction in London in 2020.