Cottage

In 1885 Van Gogh was living with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen, teaching himself to paint the people around him, the weavers and diggers and potato farmers. He kept coming back to the low thatched cottages of the heath, and told his brother Theo he felt for them the way he felt for birds' nests, calling them human nests, those cottages on the heath and the people who lived in them. The colours are all brown and moss and dun, the earth tones he was sure peasant life should be painted in. That spring his father died suddenly, and by the next year he had moved on to Antwerp and then Paris, where his palette turned bright almost overnight.