Van Gogh had a particular interest in creating character studies of working men and women in the Netherlands and Belgium, such as farmers, weavers, and fishermen.

Making up a large body of Van Gogh's work during this period, the character studies were an important, foundational component in his artistic development.

His younger brother Theo, an art dealer at the main branch of Goupil & Cie, encouraged him and started covering Van Gogh's expenses.

Charles Bargue, a French artist, wrote two books on drawing that were a significant source of study for Van Gogh.

[5] Van Gogh began drawing people from the working poor, including the prostitute Clasina Maria "Sien" Hoornik (1850–1904), with whom he would become involved.

Van Gogh dreamed his studio would one day become a form of respite for the poor where they could receive food, shelter and money for posing.

Van Gogh likened the "unrefined" characteristics of his drawings to harsh "yellow soap" made of lye.

[8] Van Gogh's relationship with Sien changed as they lived together with Maria, her five-year-old daughter, to the great disappointment of his family.

[15] He held laborers up to a high standard of the dedication with which he should approach painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself.

"[15] The close association of peasants and the cycles of nature particularly interested Van Gogh, such as the sowing of seeds, harvest and sheaves of wheat in the fields.

"[16]In November 1882, Van Gogh began drawings of individuals to depict a range of character types from the working class.

[19] So thoroughly was he engaged in living the peasant lifestyle, his appearance and manner of speech began to separate himself from others, but this was a cost he believed he needed to bear for his artistic development.

[20] Of getting along better with "poor and common folk" than cultured society, Van Gogh wrote in 1882, "after all, it's right and proper that I should live like an artist in the surroundings I'm sensitive to and am trying to express.

Van Gogh made at least 20 studies while in Nuenen of Gordina, who possessed the "coarse, flat faces, low foreheads and thick lips, not sharp but full" of peasants that he admired in Jean-François Millet's work.

[7] In July 2022, an x-ray of the painting Head of a Peasant Woman with White Cap uncovered a hidden self-portrait of Van Gogh on the back of the original artwork.

Desiring to make studies of peasants in Drenthe during his three-month stay in 1883, Van Gogh had difficulty finding people willing to pose for him.

Seeking realism, Van Gogh was "convinced that in the long run to portray peasants in their coarseness gives better results than introducing conventional sweetness.

It is typical of the peasant studies that he made in Nuenen, "with its restricted palette of dark tones, coarse fracture, and blocky drawing.

In 1885 Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo of his attempts to manage the backlit lighting, "especially figures à contre jour (English against daylight).

I have studies of heads, both lit and against the light, and I have worked on the whole figure a number of times, a seamstress, [someone] winding yarn or peeling potatoes.

[33] Years after making the paintings, Van Gogh wrote in 1888 of the solitary nature of the occupation: "A weaver or a basket maker often spends whole seasons alone, or almost alone, with his craft as his only distraction.

"[34] Van Gogh had a poetic ideal in painting rural life and dreamed of a time when he might work side-by-side with his brother: "Theo, be a painter, try to disentangle yourself and come to Drenthe… So boy, do come and paint with me on the heath, in the potato field, come and walk with me behind the plow and the shepherd -- come and sit with me, looking into the fire -- let the storm that blows across the heath blow through you.

Plowing, sowing, and harvesting were seen by Van Gogh as symbols for man's command of nature and its eternal cycles of life.

[41] "A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it."

[40] Van Gogh experimented with different mediums and techniques[39] and the effect of light from the window on items in the room using lighter shades of gray.

[41] Rural weaving was not a prosperous trade; income could vary dramatically depending upon crop yields for material and market conditions.

Carl Nordenfolk, art historian, wrote: "Van Gogh presents the weaver as a victim held fast in the spiked jaws of the loom, or a captive in a medieval instrument of torture.

A 1969 French text commented that although the depictions are awkward and rigid, "the suite of 'Weavers' is stunning in its presence, its mystery, its brutal force.

Van Gogh may have been inspired by the description of Jean-François Millet's biographer, Alfred Sensier of Potato Planting: "one of his [Millet's] most beautiful works" of a married couple "on a wide plain, at the edge of which is a village is lost in the luminous atmosphere; the man opens the ground and the woman drops in the seed potato.