Women Mending Nets in the Dunes

Early in 1882 Van Gogh had only just decided he was going to be an artist at all. He was 28, living in The Hague, taking his first proper lessons from a relative by marriage, the established painter Anton Mauve, who lent him money and a studio. This is the work of those months. Out in the dunes near the fishing village of Scheveningen, women sit mending the long brown nets the herring boats depended on. There is no drama in it, and none intended. Van Gogh was teaching himself to look hard at laborers doing ordinary work, the subject he would keep coming back to. He painted it on paper, quickly, the way you practice something you badly want to get right.