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In 1885 Vincent van Gogh was living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, in his father's parsonage, painting the peasants and their houses in the browns and near-blacks of the soil around him. This was the year of his first large figure picture, the grim Potato Eaters, and his palette had not yet met the bright light of southern France. The paint here is thick and dark, kept close to the earth rather than made pretty for a buyer. He was drawn again and again to these low, sinking peasant cottages under heavy trees, and in his letters he called such houses human nests.