The Grape Harvest

The young woman walking towards you carries two empty baskets, so her day's picking has not begun. She has turned her head back over her shoulder, and the museum allows two readings of that turn. She may be answering the men out among the vines behind her, or checking the sky, since a storm is gathering behind the hill.

The year is 1880, which in this building means something particular. That was the year a 27-year-old Vincent van Gogh, then in the Belgian coal country of the Borinage, decided he would become an artist, and French painters of country labour were the measure he set himself. Bastien-Lepage was one of them, admired for showing field work without tidying it up. The Van Gogh Museum bought this canvas at the Maastricht art fair in 2016 and put it on the first floor, at the opening of the rooms about Van Gogh's own peasant subjects.