Burning Weeds

Vincent van Gogh

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In July 1883, Van Gogh decided to try his hand at lithography for a second time. This is one of two prints he produced that summer on a scale he hoped would cater to illustration projects. The subject reveals his early interest in the work of the renowned French painter of peasant subjects, Jean-François Millet. In 1881, he read Alfred Sensier’s biography of Millet, which illustrates a sheet of sketches featuring a woman burning weeds. The standing figure poking the fire in the background is reminiscent of illustrations in the Sensier volume. For this work, he used a fine pen on smooth transfer paper and encountered some difficulty with the fidelity of the transfer to the lithographic stone and subsequent printing. Consequently, he touched up the print extensively with pen and ink.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art