Young Peasant Girl with a Hoe

Breton was born in Courrières, a farming village in northern France, and he went back there for his models year after year. He painted this girl in the village in 1882.

Two years before that, Courrières had a visitor who never got past the gate. Vincent van Gogh, 26 and out of work in the Belgian coalfields, set out to see the painter he admired most. He spent his 10 francs on a train ticket and walked the rest, about a week on the road. Breton's studio turned out to be a plain new brick building, and Van Gogh told his brother Theo it looked chilly and unwelcoming, of a Methodist regularity. He did not dare knock.

The picture itself is small, roughly 52 by 47 centimetres, one girl and her hoe seen close up. It hangs in Amsterdam among the contemporaries the Van Gogh Museum collects.