Pictures of the Month | November 2009
Picture of the Month
November 2009
A Peasant Woman Digging [1885]
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Following his move to Nuenen, near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh began making a large number of studies of local peasants working in the fields, digging, gleaning and reaping. In A Peasant Woman Digging, Van Gogh shows a woman stooped over, digging at the soil, her back and head bent low to the ground. Her awkward and ungainly pose, along with her concealed face and worn hands, emphasise the mechanical nature of her work.
Whilst a muted palette of earthy tones and hues was used for this work, this painting possesses a luminous quality created by Van Gogh’s dedication to portraying the subject. The artist had been particularly influenced by Jean-François Millet’s peasant subjects. Millet’s A Milkmaid (1853) also hangs in the Blue Gallery at the Barber Institute. In Millet’s work the subject stems from his early experience of rural life in Normandy, where he was born into a peasant family.
Van Gogh, however, was inspired by this rural subject much later in his artistic career, spending two years in Nuenen from 1884, studying the men and women at work there. Writing to his brother Theo on the 6th July, 1885 he explained "I have here before me some figures: a woman ... seen from the front, her head almost on the ground, digging carrots.” Whilst the blue dress and cap that the woman wears stand out from the natural colours surrounding her, she is very much a part of the agricultural process, and therefore the landscape itself.
Van Gogh had also complained to his brother Theo that his pictures were not selling well. His brother thought this was because they where too dark and not in line with the current vogue for Impressionist works. Following his move to Paris in 1886, Van Gogh’s style changed dramatically, into the colourful and fluid style traditionally associated with him.
Chosen by David Lodge, Novelist and Emeritus Professor of English, University of Birmingham “My favourite painting in the Barber is one of the smallest in the collection — Vincent van Gogh’s A Peasant Woman Digging [1885]. It’s an early work, but already Van Gogh’s originality and genius are evident in the bold brushwork. There is an anticipation of Cubism, it seems to me, in the planes and angles of the woman’s figure, but the treatment also vividly conveys the ache of a lifetime’s labour in her bones. ‘I have been watching those peasant figures for a year and half, just to catch their character,’ Van Gogh recorded, and he succeeded wonderfully in this painting.” |
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