#peasants

Apparently this was one of six paintings a merchant banker in Antwerp commissioned to track the months of the year — this one's high summer. Only five are known to survive.

The men at the table were, supposedly, farm workers from his family's estate. He painted this same card game more than once, with fewer players crowded round it each time.

He painted this back in his hometown, and the two women are said to be his sisters. Farm work, done at a size usually saved for kings and battles — apparently that's exactly what annoyed people about him at the time.

He painted this same striding figure more than once; the version that went to the Paris Salon and got people arguing about whether farm labourers belonged in serious painting is a different one, elsewhere. Van Gogh, apparently, copied the sower over and over for years — he treated it as something to learn from rather than something to hang.

They've stopped for the evening prayer — the bell would be ringing from that little church on the horizon. Dalí was supposedly obsessed with this picture, insisting the couple were actually mourning a dead child, and an X-ray later turned up a painted-over shape near the basket. No one seems to agree what it was.

Gleaning was, apparently, a legal right for the poorest people in a village — once the harvest was carted off you could go over the field and keep whatever was left. Well-off critics at the time took badly to seeing that painted this big, and read three women picking up scraps as a political argument rather than a scene.

The aim, from what I can find, was people who looked like they'd actually dug the food sitting in front of them — in a letter he said he wanted the whole thing to smell of bacon, smoke and potato steam. It got pulled apart when it was new, apparently even by a painter friend of his, mostly over the drawing being off.