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A Peasant Woman Digging

Image credit: The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

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Notes

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Van Gogh lived for two years at Nuenen in Holland painting peasant subjects. In such works he uses a palette of drab earth colours far removed from the vibrant contrasting pigments of his later radical paintings. He wrote to his brother in July 1885 about a ‘woman ... seen from the front, her head almost on the ground, digging carrots’. ‘I have been watching those peasant figures for more than a year and a half’, he added, ‘just to catch their character’. The artist was convinced that he got ‘better results by painting them in their roughness than by giving them a conventional charm’.
Title

A Peasant Woman Digging

Date

1885

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

H 42 x W 32 cm

Accession number

61.8

Acquisition method

purchased, 1961

Work type

Painting

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Normally on display at

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, West Midlands B15 2TS England

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