During his time in The Hague, Vincent van Gogh had his first real opportunity to study the human figure from life. This led to a new confidence, which, upon his 1884 move to Nuenen in the southern Netherlands, motivated the painter to pursue more ambitious figural studies. The most significant of his completed multi-figure compositions, The Potato Eaters (Hulsker, no. 764; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), was painted in Nuenen from April to May of 1885. When this self-styled "masterwork" was met only with criticism, van Gogh redirected his energies, and practiced depicting more exact representations of the human form in a large series of drawings of rural Nuenen workers. His approach entailed breaking the body down into basic shapes-circles, ovals, ellipses--and basic volumetric forms. As Sjraar van Heugten has observed, "This turned out to have a spectacular result, for the figure studies of working peasant men and women from the summer of 1885 are almost overwhelming in their monumentality and expressivity and are among the most successful figures in van Gogh's entire oeuvre" (in Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings, New York, 2005, p. 58).
The present drawing belongs to the approximately fifty surviving sheets from the summer of 1885 during which van Gogh dedicated himself almost entirely to drawing agricultural workers. It is one of two very similar drawings of women planting beets that van Gogh almost certainly completed in the same posing session. Both are annotated at the lower left, "Planteuse de betteraves, juin." The other work (Hulsker, no. 821; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) is a vertical composition.
Throughout his career, van Gogh was deeply influenced by Jean-François Millet's portrayal of peasants. In his own work, he hoped to approach what he saw as Millet's allusion to profound truths through forthright realism. By 1880, van Gogh had collected almost fifty of Millet's prints, which he tacked to his walls. His laboring sowers, diggers, peasant women and farmers from 1885 owe a great deal to the study of reproductions of Millet works such as Les Glaneuses, 1857 (fig. 1). In a letter to Theo, he expressed his wish to understand and relate to his subjects as Millet had. He wanted to "paint peasants as if one were one of them, as if one felt and thought as they do" [Letter: 404].
In another letter, van Gogh stated that he regarded these figure studies "as the beginning of a whole series of all kinds of labor in the fields." [Letter: 418] It is possible that the artist planned a sequence of paintings inspired by an illustrated series of the months by Léon Lhermitte, which he admired a great deal. Theo mailed Lhermitte's illustrations to Vincent as soon as each was published in Le Monde Illustré, and the painter often wrote to his brother in anticipation of the receipt of another 'month.' If it is indeed the case that van Gogh expected to use these drawings for a painting cycle, a drawing such as Planteuse des betteraves, which is annotated "June," may have been considered symbolic of this distinct seasonal moment of the year.
(fig. 1) Jean-François Millet, Les Glaneuses, 1857. Musée du Louvre, Paris. BARCODE 20625184