Vom Wind gepeitschter Baum

By August 1883 Vincent van Gogh had been trying to become an artist for only about three years, and he was still working in the muted browns and greens of the Dutch coast, long before the sunflowers and the light of the south of France. Living near The Hague, he painted this single tree with its trunk bent almost flat, its branches twisted by the constant wind off the North Sea. It is a plain, hard-worked study of a plant fighting its weather, the kind of unglamorous subject he preferred while teaching himself to draw. The painting later passed into a private collection in Zurich, and in 1997 it was stolen from there. It has not been seen since.