Paysanne arrachant des pommes de terre

This comes from the summer of 1885, when Van Gogh was living at Nuenen and had just finished the dark, ambitious Potato Eaters. Worn out by big canvases, he decided to make small studies instead, and spent months drawing and painting local farmhands at their work. He wanted to show peasants as Jean-Francois Millet had, ennobled by hard labour rather than pitied. So the woman here is built like the earth she digs, bent low over a potato fork in heavy clogs, her face barely a face. The colours are the colour of that soil, browns and dull greens with almost no light. Within months he would leave for Antwerp, then Paris, where his whole palette caught fire. This study is in the museum at Antwerp.