Avenue of Poplars at Sunset

Van Gogh painted this on a November evening in 1884 in Nuenen, the Dutch village where his father was the Protestant pastor. This is the Van Gogh from before Paris, before the bright colour, working in the browns and greys of the country around him. Bare poplars line a road that runs straight to the setting sun, and a lone woman walks toward it. He builds the whole picture on that receding line, with the vanishing point sitting right on the sun. A researcher recently matched the trees and light to a stretch of road called the Weverstraat on the 13th or 14th of November that year. Van Gogh had been painting seriously for only a few years.