Peasant Making a Basket

Peasant Making a Basket (1885) at the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland depicts another of the traditional craft skills Van Gogh documented in Nuenen — the making of wicker baskets, a pre-industrial domestic skill that supplemented agricultural income in Brabant villages. He had been fascinated since his earliest artistic work with the hands engaged in skilled labour, and the basket-maker's hands — working the osier rods with practiced precision — were a subject that combined physical observation with his broader moral commitment to depicting useful work with dignity. The painting connects to his weaver studies of the same period: both are images of traditional craft production carried out within domestic space, both threatened by the industrialisation Van Gogh could see advancing from the cities. A Swiss municipal museum's holding of this work speaks to the broad European distribution of Van Gogh's Nuenen output through early-twentieth-century collecting.

The figure is rendered in dark, earthy tones characteristic of Van Gogh's Dutch period — umbers, sienna, and black dominant throughout. The weaving hands and the basket structure are rendered with careful attention to the interlocking forms. Paint application is confident and textured, built up in layers that give the surface physical presence.