Autumn

Dupré painted this in the woods near Compiègne, north of Paris. The woodcutter is in there, so small among the trunks that people miss him, and that was the point: the man is dwarfed by the wood he is working in.

In February 1882 the Hague branch of the dealers Goupil sold the canvas to Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the Dutch painter of the sea, who put the money his own pictures earned into French landscapes. It went on show in The Hague that summer, and Vincent van Gogh, living in the city then and once a clerk at that same Goupil branch, saw it. A year later he was still thinking about it. Writing to his brother Theo in July 1883, he said the picture expressed the moment and the place in nature where a person can go alone, without company.

Mesdag and his wife Sientje handed their whole collection to the Dutch state in 1903, and it is still shown in the house they built for it.