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Artist or Maker: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
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Exhibited: Basel, Kunsthalle,
Vincent van Gogh
, 1947, no. 145.
Frankfurt am Main, Städelsches Kunstinstitut; Zurich, Kunsthaus, and London, Royal Academy,
Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Robert von Hirsch
, 1978, no. 146.
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Notes: (see lot 24) shows the artist confidently applying his deftly descriptive line to the latest developments in progressive Parisian painting. Vincent would never cease drawing; as he had predicted, his early works on paper formed "the root" of his great work to come.
"What is drawing?" Vincent van Gogh asked in an 1882 letter to his brother Theo. "How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall--since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently." [Letter: 237] By the early fall of 1885, van Gogh had been successfully "filing through," or shortening the distance between what his sensibility demanded he draw or paint, and what he was technically able to accomplish. Drawings from Nuenen, like Woman by the washtub, with their exploration of volumetric forms, genre and labor, were an integral part of that learning process.
In sharp contrast to the class isolation and unidealized labor of Edgar Degas's urban laundresses (fig. 1), or even Honoré Daumier's sympathetic washerwomen by the Seine, the stooped woman in van Gogh's drawing seems to affirm her connection to the larger life of the community. Clad in her pendulous skirt and workers' clogs, the woman stoops to scrub clothes in her washtub, assuming a pose strikingly similar to one Van Gogh used to depict farmers harvesting or planting in the fields. This may connect the "women's work" of washing clothes with the other traditional components of rural labor which van Gogh heroicized, such as the manifold chores of farming, which similarly contributed to the welfare of the community.
The present drawing belongs to a small group of peasant women from Van Gogh's 1885 series of Nuenen rural labor. Although the background of the present drawing is more completely rendered, it is very similar in composition to Peasant Woman at the Wash Tub, now in the Kröller-Müller Museum. (Hulsker, no. 906). It should also be related to Peasant Woman, Spreading out the Laundry (Hulsker, no. 907). In the latter drawing, the peasant woman takes up a smaller area of the page, as van Gogh included more details of the landscape around her.
Around the time Woman by the wash tub was executed, van Gogh was unjustly accused of impregnating a young girl in the vicinity. A local priest made it his mission to condemn the artist, with the result that by September he found it difficult to convince the peasants of Nuenen to pose for him. The artist--who once wrote to his brother, "Drawing is the root of everything" [Letter 290]--considered moving to Antwerp in order to continue his pursuit of a more formal artistic education. By the end of 1885, the local situation had made it necessary for him to leave if he hoped to continue working. In the end, van Gogh's stay in Antwerp would be a short one. A few months later, the artist moved to Paris to make a new start, and thus definitively ended the richly promising and formative Dutch period of his career.
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Les repasseuses (Women Ironing), 1884. Courtesy of The Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles. BARCODE 20625160
