Autumn Landscape with Four Trees

Van Gogh painted these bare trees behind the garden of his parents' house in the Brabant village of Nuenen in November 1885, and within a few weeks he had left the village for good, first for Antwerp and then for Paris. The spring before, he had been reading the French art theorist Charles Blanc on simultaneous contrast, the idea that colours strengthen or weaken one another depending on what is set beside them. After that he stopped matching the colour in front of him. The real yellow of the autumn leaves is not in the picture. He kept the whole canvas inside one family of orange and brown to see how many different tones that family would hold, and he told his brother Theo that the laws of colour are inexpressibly splendid precisely because they are not coincidences.