Two Peasant Women Digging Potatoes

In the late summer of 1885 Van Gogh was living in the Brabant village of Nuenen, and he had set himself a stubborn goal: to paint the people who worked the land, exactly as they were. Here two women bend over the dark soil, lifting potatoes, their backs curved into the same heavy line. He kept the whole palette close to the earth itself, browns and muddy greens under a low grey sky, and made no attempt to soften the coarse hands or the bulk of the working bodies. He thought a peasant picture ought to smell of bacon and smoke and turned earth rather than of perfume, and he wanted the paint to feel as rough as the labour it showed. The bare trees behind the women set the scene at the turn of the season, when the crop had to come out of the ground before the frost.