Zwei Ratten

Long before the sunflowers and the bright yellow of the south, Van Gogh spent two grey years in the Dutch village of Nuenen painting weavers, peasants and dark still lifes. He made this in November 1884, a study of two dead rats laid on a plain surface, in browns and blacks with almost no colour at all. It is exactly the kind of low, unwanted subject he chose on purpose in these years, teaching himself to paint by looking hard at ordinary and even repellent things. A few months later, in the same brown key, he would paint The Potato Eaters, the picture he thought of as his first real work. The rats are set down as carefully as any portrait.