Cottage

This belongs to the two years Van Gogh spent in the Dutch village of Nuenen, living in his father's parsonage and painting the peasants and their homes. In the spring of 1885 he was finishing The Potato Eaters, his dark picture of a family at supper, and the low cottages of the weavers and farm labourers held him for the same reason. He called such houses nests, and painted their mud walls and mossy thatch in the browns and deep greens of the soil around them. There is no bright colour here yet. That came only after he left this flat country, first for Antwerp and then Paris, where he saw what other painters were doing with light.