Duas camponesas cavando

This is another of the peasant studies Vincent van Gogh made in Nuenen in 1885, the same run of drawings and paintings in which he tried to show country labour without softening it. Two women bend low over the ground, digging, their dark clothes almost merging with the soil they turn. Van Gogh wanted the bodies to look heavy and rooted, shaped by the work rather than posed for a viewer. He wanted people to sense that these were figures who fed themselves by hard physical labour, close to the land. He kept the palette to muted browns and greys, the colours he associated then with the earth and the poor.