Peasant Woman with Child on Her Lap

This is Van Gogh before the sunflowers and the blazing yellows, five years before his death, still in the Dutch village of Nuenen where his father was the Protestant minister. Through the winter and spring of 1885 he painted dozens of local farm labourers, wanting their heads and hands coarse, weathered and unflattered, nothing prettified. He held the palette to the browns and dull greens of the soil they worked, laid on thick and blocky. Studies like this one, of a peasant mother with a child on her knee, were his practice runs for the large group scene he was building toward that April, The Potato Eaters, the dark canvas he considered his first real accomplishment as a painter.