Because work is so hard to draw... To paint these people means to be with them in the...

Vincent Van Gogh: [In letter] Dear Theo, Thank you for the money, and the paints and canvas. With your help I go forward. I feel the force to work growing daily within me. Do you realize Theo that what I'm doing is new. In the paintings of the old masters, did you ever see a single man or woman at work? Did they ever try to paint a laborer or a man digging? They didn't, and for good reason: because work is so hard to draw... To paint these people means to be with them in the fields day after day, and by their firesides at night. Since the rains came I've become absorbed in the weavers. They make such good subjects; the old oak wood darkened by the sweat of hands, and the shadow of the looms on the gray mud walls. All these months I've been trying to find a pattern; trying not so much to draw hands as gestures, not so much faces as the expressions of people - men and women who know the meaning of toil. I want to make clear that these people - sitting round a meal of potatoes in the evening - have turned the soil with the very hands they put in the dish, that they have honestly earned their food. I want to paint something that smells of bacon, smoke, and steam; something that's the good dark color of our Dutch earth.