Autumn Landscape with Four Trees

Van Gogh painted these four bare trees in November 1885, and within weeks he would be gone from the Netherlands for good. He was living in Nuenen, the village where his father had been the Protestant pastor, and the trees stood on farmland behind the parsonage. He had drawn this same clump before. This time he spent three days on it in oil, working in the dark browns and dull golds of the Brabant countryside, the palette of a man who had not yet seen the bright colour of Paris. Late that autumn he left for Antwerp, and then for his brother in Paris, and the sombre tones here vanished from his work almost at once. Two small figures walk the path between the fields.