織工、三つの小窓のある室内

By 1884 the hand-loom weavers of Brabant were a dying trade, pushed out by the steam-powered mills, and Vincent van Gogh spent about six months in the village of Nuenen painting them anyway. He admired them the way he admired peasants, as people leading a hard and honest life. Here the weaver sits swallowed by his loom, which Van Gogh called the wooden monster, a black tangle of beams filling most of the room. Three small windows behind let in yellow light off the autumn leaves outside, which he set against the blue of the cloth on the loom. He wanted the dusky workshop to feel like a Rembrandt interior. The man himself is small, almost a fixture of the machine he works.