Van Gogh lived for two years at Nuenen in Holland painting peasant subjects. In such works he uses a palette of drab earth colours far removed from the vibrant contrasting pigments of his later radical paintings. He wrote to his brother in July 1885 about a ‘woman ... seen from the front, her head almost on the ground, digging carrots’. ‘I have been watching those peasant figures for more than a year and a half’, he added, ‘just to catch their character’. The artist was convinced that he got ‘better results by painting them in their roughness than by giving them a conventional charm’.