Burning Weeds

In the summer of 1883, van Gogh was living in The Hague, deep in a period of intense experimentation with printmaking. "Burning Weeds" belongs to a small group of transfer lithographs he made that July, the same month he produced "Gardener by an Apple Tree," and it reflects his sustained obsession with peasant labor and the rhythms of working-class life. The medium itself is unusual for van Gogh: transfer lithography allowed him to draw directly onto a special paper before transferring the image to a stone, and he then reinforced the composition with pen and ink, which gives the figures their scratchy, almost desperate energy. At this point in his career, van Gogh was not yet the colorist we know from his Arles period. His world was brown, grey, and earthen, influenced by the Dutch Masters and by the social realism he admired in the illustrations of popular print magazines.

The image captures something van Gogh returned to again and again in these years: ordinary people performing thankless, seasonal work. Burning weeds was a common agricultural task, and rather than romanticizing the scene, he renders it with a kind of raw directness. Smoke, bent backs, the flat Dutch landscape stretching behind. His letters to his brother Theo from this period are full of sketches and descriptions of laborers, and works like this one show how closely his printmaking ran alongside that documentary impulse. It is a small, modest sheet, but it carries the same conviction that would eventually define the great paintings to come.