La Chaumière du tisserand

This is van Gogh a few years before the colour arrived. In 1884 he was living with his parents in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch province of Brabant, and he spent much of that year among the local weavers, drawing and painting them at their wooden hand looms. He saw them as trapped, worn-down figures doing slow and punishing work, and he wanted city people, who never gave them a thought, to notice they existed. Hand weaving was already losing ground to the mills. The palette here is all browns and greys, the sober Dutch tone he used before Paris and the south of France opened his eyes to bright colour a couple of years later.