A Peasant Woman Digging in Front of Her Cottage

Driven by the loneliness and poverty he had experienced in the Hague, Vincent van Gogh returned to his parents’ home in the Netherlands in 1883. There he created a series of paintings of cottages based on his walks through the village. He wrote to his brother, "I feel for the brood and the nests—particularly those human nests, those cottages on the heath and their inhabitants.”