縫い物をする女性

This is Van Gogh five years before the sunflowers and the bright southern light, still living near his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen in 1885. That winter and spring he was making study after study of local weavers and peasants, working toward the dark interior he would call The Potato Eaters. Here a woman sews by a small window, and the problem he set himself was the light. He wrote to his brother Theo about how hard it was to paint a figure against a bright window, with the head almost black and the glass almost white. He solved it by throwing the strongest light onto her hands. Everything else in the room is the colour of earth and old wood, which is exactly how he wanted it then.