Weaver Facing Right (Half-Figure)

Van Gogh moved into his parents' house in Nuenen in December 1883, and within weeks he was going into the cottages of the village weavers. On 4 January 1884 he told his brother Theo that so far he had made three watercolours of them, and that he knew very few drawings of weavers by anyone else. This canvas is dated to that same January, which puts it at the very start of the series, as he was only beginning to take the subject from paper into oil. It is also unusually close for this group. Most of his weavers are small figures boxed in by the loom. Here the man is seen at half length and in profile, a cap on his head, his hands at work over the cloth, with only a few beams of the machine crossing in front of him. The painting belonged to the Swiss art historian Hans Robert Hahnloser in Bern, and it is still in private hands.