Donna che raccoglie patate

Van Gogh painted this in the late summer of 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, and it was homework of a kind. That spring he had finished The Potato Eaters and been told, including by people in his own circle, that his figures were flat and stiff. So he set peasant women against the fields and tried to give them weight and roundness. The woman here drives a fork into the earth for the potato harvest, her body bent to the work. He had not solved it yet, her head a little small, her hands and wooden clogs too big. He sent the panel to his brother Theo in Paris at the end of August.