Vogelnester

In the autumn of 1885 Van Gogh was living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, and he became briefly obsessed with birds' nests. A friend recalled that he kept as many as 30 of them in his studio, gathered on his own walks or bought from local children for about ten cents each. He painted them in a run of still lifes against dark backgrounds, drawn, as he told his brother Theo, to the colours of the moss, dead leaves and dried grass. Van Gogh saw something human in a nest. He tied the word to home and to the shelter of ordinary families, the same people whose dim cottages he was painting that year. A few months after this he left the Netherlands for good, and these dark, earthy studies are among the last things he made before Antwerp and then Paris changed his colour completely.