Woman Sewing

Van Gogh made this in 1881, only about a year after he decided, at 27, to become an artist at all. He was living back with his parents in Etten, a village in the Dutch province of Brabant, and he set himself a hard apprenticeship. Draw the people around him, again and again, until the human figure finally came under his hand. This sewing woman is one of those studies, worked in black chalk and washed watercolour rather than the oils he had not yet taken up. He drew local models like her dozens of times that year, caring more about the bend of a back and the set of the hands than about a likeness, teaching himself what a working body does when it settles into a task.