땅을 파는 농부

In 1882 Van Gogh was 29 and barely two years into calling himself an artist. He was living in The Hague, drawing and painting the working people he found in the fields and along the roads, and the man bent to his spade was one of his most repeated subjects. He drew diggers again and again that year, less for the field around them than for the body itself, learning how a person leans their whole weight into hard ground. The figure here has no real face and no story around him, just the pull of the work. Van Gogh kept returning to the digger for the rest of the decade, and the pose he was practising now would carry through to the Dutch peasants he painted at Nuenen a few years later.