Peasant Woman by the Fireplace

Painted in Nuenen in 1885 during Van Gogh's intensive Dutch apprenticeship, this firelight study of a peasant woman represents one of the most concentrated explorations he made of artificial interior light before his encounter with Impressionism transformed his palette entirely. He was working through the problem of how Rembrandt and the seventeenth-century Dutch masters had used a single candlelight or hearth source to model volume from darkness — a tradition he found morally as well as technically compelling, because it insisted that humble subjects deserved the same painterly seriousness as religious or mythological scenes. Alongside Jozef Israëls and the Hague School painters he admired, Van Gogh was operating in a continuity of Dutch social realism that stretched from the Golden Age through the nineteenth century. The contrast this canvas would come to have with his Arles and Saint-Rémy work was not yet imaginable — from this dark interior to The Starry Night is a span of just four years. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The palette is limited to earthen browns, deep umbers, and warm orange-red firelight. Heavy impasto models the seated figure with rough, emphatic strokes. Van Gogh deliberately avoided prettifying; the light source from the fire creates dramatic chiaroscuro, emphasising texture of fabric, wood, and skin with an almost sculptural roughness.