Focus on this artwork and analyze the Man and woman working together.
Peasant Man and Woman Planting Potatoes (F129a) is a spring-planting painting of a man and woman working together.  He turns the earth with a spade and she plants the potato seed.  The figures of both sit below the horizon, symbolic of their connection to the earth.  The painting was made in Nuenen, within the North Brabant district where Van Gogh was raised.  Two weeks after completing this painting, Van Gogh completed his best known painting, The Potato Eaters.  Potatoes were a staple in the diet of the poor peasants, those who could barely afford bread, and meat was a luxury.  Potato was a food not fit for those who could afford better in the 19th century. Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish philosopher, deemed the poor "root-eaters".  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."The previous year, Van Gogh painted Potato Planting (F172)  which shows a man creating a furrow and the woman dropping the seed potato behind him.			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
Another occupation in which a man and woman often worked together was weaving.  The woman would wind yarn into spools while the man worked at the loom creating yards of woven fabric. Women also supported men in the fishing trade by minding their nets.  In farm labor, a woman was particularly important, aiding in planting and harvesting.  There are many images above of women digging potatoes.
Potato Eaters Jean-François Millet Peasant peasant The Potato Eaters Jean-François Millet's Nuenen Thomas Carlyle North Brabant