Femme au balai

In the spring of 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, Van Gogh set himself a hard problem. He wanted to paint peasants indoors by the dim light of a lamp, and he wrote to his brother that it was so dark in the cottages he could barely tell the colours on his palette, that he was after a darkness that is still colour. This small study of a woman sweeping is one result. She bends to her broom in a plain blue dress, her own shadow thrown across the floor beside her. It comes from the same months and the same cottages as his first large picture, The Potato Eaters. The paint is thick and earthy, the whole thing built from browns barely lifted into light.