Women on the Peat Moor

Van Gogh spent October and November 1883 in Drenthe, a remote northern Dutch province of peat bogs and moorland to which he had retreated after the painful breakdown of his relationship with Sien Hoornik in The Hague. He was profoundly lonely in Drenthe and wrote some of his most despairing letters to Theo during this period, while also producing studies of peat-cutters and moorland workers that he found genuinely moving as subjects. The women on the peat moor, bent at their work in the flat, desolate landscape, embodied for him a form of human endurance stripped of any comfort or decoration — pure labour in the most inhospitable of environments. He was reading Emile Zola's Germinal at this time, with its vision of workers as a collective force barely distinguished from the dark earth they extracted; these Drenthe figures carry something of Zola's naturalist bleakness. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Broadly brushed with earth tones — raw umber, ochre, muted green — the figures merge with the boggy ground. Horizontal composition flattens the picture space. Thick, unmodulated paint gives the scene a sculptural heaviness appropriate to its subject matter.