Bauerndorf in der Dämmerung

This is Van Gogh before the colour: no yellows, no swirling skies, just a brown Dutch dusk. He painted it in 1884 in Nuenen, the village where his father was the Protestant minister and where Vincent, in his early thirties and only a couple of years into painting, had set out to become a painter of peasants. He wanted to show country people and their houses honestly, in the dark earthy tones of the old Dutch masters he admired. Low thatched cottages sit at the edge of a meadow among bare trees, and two small figures stand by a haystack as the light goes. The next year, still in Nuenen and still working this dark, he would paint The Potato Eaters.