Cottage with Trees

Before Paris and before the sunflowers, Van Gogh spent two years in the Dutch village of Nuenen, living with his parents and painting the peasants and cottages around him. He made this small study in the summer of 1885, oil on paper laid down on panel, in the same dark, earthy months that produced his first ambitious picture, The Potato Eaters. He admired the French painter Millet and wanted to show country life plainly, without prettifying it. The colors are the browns and dull greens of the Brabant soil. Within a year he would leave for Paris, meet the Impressionists and lighten everything, but the thatch, the low grey sky and the muddy tones here still belong to the northern painter he had been.