Two Diggers among Trees

Two men dig out a tree stump among trees in Saint-Rémy, painted by Van Gogh in late 1889. Its quiet subject hides one of the most debated provenance stories of any painting in an American museum.

The story behind the painting

Van Gogh painted The Diggers, also called Two Diggers or Two Diggers among Trees, in late 1889 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, less than a year before his death. The longer title separates it from his other 1889 painting, The Diggers after Jean-François Millet. After Vincent died the canvas belonged to his sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. It then passed through Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1907 and the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1909, and in 1912 the Frankfurt collector Hugo Nathan and his wife Martha bought it.

What to look for

The scene is simple: two men digging up a tree stump among trees at Saint-Rémy. The canvas is about 65 by 50 cm. The source describes it as showing Van Gogh's relationship with nature and his admiration for Jean-François Millet, who painted similar scenes of people working the land. It is considered a work of high quality, though not among his most famous. Watch how the labour of the two figures and the trees around them share the same space.

Meaning and intent

Martha Nathan inherited the painting when Hugo died in 1922. She moved it to Basel in Switzerland in 1930, almost three years before the Nazis came to power, and left Germany for Paris in 1937. In 1938 she sold it to a group of dealers, Justin Thannhauser, Alex Ball and Georges Wildenstein, who sold it in 1941 to the Detroit collector Robert H. Tannahill. He left it, with more than 450 other works, to the Detroit Institute of Arts, which received it at his death in 1970.

Legacy

In 2004, fifteen of Martha Nathan's heirs said she had been forced to sell under Nazi persecution. The museum's researcher Laurie Stein found that the painting had been moved to Switzerland early and sold at a price normal for the time, and historians such as Jonathan Petropoulos and Sidney Bolkosky called the claim weak. A court ruled for the museum in 2007, and a later case was dismissed on time limits. The museum's use of that defence was criticised, and in 2016 Congress passed the HEAR Act to end such tactics.