1884 · Nuenen · Knot of Motif

The Weavers

He painted the same proportion over and over, and in the end took no side.

F24 Weaver Facing Left 1884
F30 Weaver (interior with three windows) 1884
F26 Weaver Near an Open Window 1884

The Ferocious Reader

At the same time he was reading Zola's Germinal and George Eliot's Adam Bede — two novels about working people. He wrote to Theo: "After reading Germinal, I dared to begin painting those weavers and peasants." The novels taught him to see the labouring body before the brush could follow. The ferocious reader formed before the painter did. The novels even walked straight into the compositions: scholars connect the sheet Weaver, with a Baby in a Highchair to Eliot's Silas Marner — the lonely weaver redeemed by the arrival of a foundling. The baby in the highchair beside the loom had sat in a novel first.

Synaesthetic Precision

What he wanted to paint was not the look of the loom but its weight. In a letter: "an old oak thing." A thing (ding), an old (oud), a brown (bruin). Three of the simplest words held the machine's age, mass, and smell. Then he translated the three words back into burnt umber and ochre on canvas.

Painting

Four oil paintings, plus drawings and watercolours — over twenty pieces in all; four oils shown here, four postures. The loom is a black oak skeleton, vast, intricate, filling the room. The weaver sits in the middle, smaller than the machine. The pigments are the colours of Brabant — burnt umber, ochre, dark green, coal-black. Almost no bright tones. He was painting an industrial-age stations of the cross: the machine as bones, the man as the flesh caught between them.

Letter

1884, Nuenen. He wrote: "Those weavers and that sort of people are actually more difficult than large figures." He described the loom in front of him: "It is an old oak thing that has turned brown, and in that wood there are all kinds of scratches and stains." To Theo: "I now have four weavers' looms that I'm working on." He painted them one after another, like field research. The idea predates Nuenen by five years: in 1879 he had walked through the weaving villages of Belgium and northern France, and what he first saw was an almost meditative aura. Only when he settled in Nuenen — a village of four hundred and forty weavers — did he see the reality: hardworking, poor, exploited craftsmen. There was, he wrote, "often something agitated and restless" about them. The field research finally yielded sixteen full ink-and-watercolour drawings and ten paintings.

Place

Nuenen, a Brabant weaving village. The looms stood in the cottages beside his father's parsonage — one room, one machine, one family, a single oil lamp through the wet winters. He sat in those corners for months, stamping his feet when his hands stiffened. This was 1884, four years before colour, the winter before the Potato Eaters — the apprenticeship in darkness that the famous painting would graduate from.

The Ferocious Reader

Synaesthetic Precision

before

Nuenen, 1884. He came from The Hague carrying his obsession with painting labourers; this time he went into the weavers' houses and stayed for months.

now

The loom fills the picture, the weaver seated inside the machine, almost becoming part of its structure. He made a dozen or more, adjusting again and again the proportion between loom and man — is the man working the machine, or has the machine shut the man inside it?

after

He did not resolve the question; he carried it onward, toward The Potato Eaters.

Events

1884-01 The Ferocious Reader · Letter 432
Reading Zola's Germinal and George Eliot's Adam Bede. Two novels of working-class life sat on his desk at the same time
1884-03 Synaesthetic Precision · Letter 435
Wrote a letter describing the loom in front of him: 'An old oak thing that has turned brown, with all kinds of scratches and stains in the wood.' Three plainest words holding the machine's age, weight, and smell
1884-05 The Colour Experimenter · Letter 436
'I now have four weavers' looms that I'm working on.' He began treating the loom as a continuous motif for research
1884-07 The Copyist · Letter 437
Sent weaver drawings to the painter Van Rappard for his judgement. He was now sending the weaver series outward as completed work
1884-09 Synaesthetic Precision · Letter 432
Wrote: 'Those weavers and that sort of people are actually more difficult than large figures.' Placing labourers at the top of the difficulty hierarchy — that is, at the top of research value
1884-12 The Translator · Letter 439
Roughly thirty weaver works in total during Nuenen — oils, drawings, watercolours — preparing the figure vocabulary for The Potato Eaters the following year

From the Letters

Die wevers en dat soort volk zijn eigenlijk moeilijker dan groote figuren, maar wat is het mooi in de natuur.

Those weavers and that sort of people are actually more difficult than large figures, but how beautiful it is in nature.

Letter 432

Het is een oud eiken ding dat bruin is geworden, en in dat hout zijn allerlei krassen en vlekken.

It is an old oak thing that has turned brown, and in that wood there are all kinds of scratches and stains.

Letter 435

Ik heb nu vier weversgetouwen, die ik onder handen heb.

I now have four weavers' looms that I'm working on.

Letter 436

Letter Sources

Van Gogh letter records referenced on this page, linked to the Van Gogh Letters Project. vangoghletters.org