For Van Gogh, drawing was his way into life as an artist. At the end of the 1870s he had little idea of pursuing an artistic career; lacking faith in his own skill, it was discovering a manual of drawing that gave him the confidence to commit himself to a new path. He began by copying prints and examples from books and quickly progressed to working from live models or three-dimensional plasters and by 1881 he was beginning to produce independent works on subjects of his own choosing. Executed the following year, the present work belongs to this group of drawings that constitute the foundations of Van Gogh’s career and reveal an already prodigious talent at work.

Van Gogh moved to The Hague in the winter of 1881-82; he initially considered staying in the small nearby coastal village of Scheveningen but the prohibitive cost of models and accommodation there caused him to reconsider and he settled in some rooms on the edge of the town. There he continued his practice of drawing from life; he joined an artist’s society which allowed him to go to life study evenings twice a week and otherwise searched for models in the surrounding neighbourhood. Sjaar van Heugten notes his practice of going out to look for subjects, making sketches in situ that were then used “back in the studio to put a model in the same pose. He had several items of clothing in his collection […] in order to lend the scene an air of authenticity” (Sjaar van Heugten, Vincent Van Gogh Drawings. Volume I. The Early Years 1880-1883, Amsterdam and London, 1996, p. 35).
This may have been the approach used for the present work; the subject shows two women, one with a kettle in hand, presumably on the way to or from filling it with water. They are clearly show in motion but with the entire focus on the two figures and no contextual detail offered, there is a sense that they could have been transposed from a quick sketch and worked up in a studio setting. This would have given Van Gogh more time to focus on the detail of their faces and hands and experiment with clothing, capturing the folds across the body as he did in other contemporaneous works (fig. 1).

The left hand figure is an older woman possibly based on one of the residents of the Dutch Reformed Old People’s Home which Van Gogh discovered in September 1882. Jan Hulsker suggests that the other woman may have been a young woman called Sien Hoornik who Van Gogh met in early 1882. Sien modelled for Van Gogh along with her sister and mother, initially as paid models and then – when she became Van Gogh’s lover – providing him with a free and constantly-available model (figs. 2-4). Van Gogh described meeting her: “This winter I met a pregnant woman, abandoned by the man whose child she was carrying. A pregnant woman who roamed the streets in winter – who had to earn her bread, you can imagine how […] I paid her rent and have now been able, thank God, to preserve her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her […] I wish that those who wish me well understood that what I’m doing is prompted by a deep feeling of and need for love […]. Anyone who love an ordinary, everyday person & is loved by her is happy – despite the dark side of life” (Hans Luijten, Van Gogh and Love, Amsterdam, 2007, p. 18). His family were strongly opposed to the relationship and Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo show him continuing to try and justify the relationship in the face of familial concern and skepticism. Despite this, Sien moved in with him and they spent the summer of 1882 living as man and wife, while she raised her child.

Right: Fig. 4, Vincent van Gogh, Head of a woman, 1882-83, pencil, black lithographic crayon and grey wash on paper, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
There is a suggestion that the woman in the present drawing may be pregnant in the way she rests her hand on her stomach, and this was Jan Hulsker’s hypothesis when he titled the work Sien, Pregnant, Walking with Older Woman. Certainly, Van Gogh pays particular attention to this figure; her features and downcast mien are vividly rendered and her hands wrought with real veracity.
From his letters, it is clear that Van Gogh felt at home living a simple life among these people, using his growing skills to capture their lives and exploring the depths of human experience in his often deeply expressive portraits of them. These early years and studies of everyday life - whether old women queuing for money or peasants working the fields - would provide the bedrock for his artistic career. Writing of Van Gogh’s work over the course of these formative years and leading up to his first major oil paintings Jan Hulsker notes: “what is most noteworthy is that he did things entirely his own way. He was not trying to achieve a romantic idealization of the subjects, but to render them forcefully and realistically, a striving that [...] would culminate in his famous painting of the Potato Eaters” (J. Hulsker, op. cit., pp. 142 and 144).