A Woman with a Spade, Seen From Behind

A Woman with a Spade, Seen From Behind (1885) at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto belongs to Van Gogh's series of female agricultural labour studies in Nuenen, extending his documentation of women's work to the distinctive compositional challenge of the figure seen from behind. He deliberately avoided the conventional face-to-viewer orientation of portraiture for many of his labour studies, preferring the back view that showed the figure's posture in the act of work — the set of shoulders, the weight distribution, the specific attitude of a body committed to a physical task. The back view of a labouring figure had a specific precedent in Millet (who used it for several of his most famous peasant compositions) and in Courbet's Stonebreakers. The Art Gallery of Ontario holds this as part of a significant collection of European painting that represents the museum's ongoing engagement with the history of art from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.

The rear view of the figure focuses all attention on posture and the relationship between body and implement. Van Gogh renders the anonymous back and shoulders with the same careful observation he gave to faces, finding in the body's working posture its own expressive truth. The dark Dutch palette is consistent with his Nuenen period.