Cottages

In the autumn of 1883 Van Gogh went out to Drenthe, a remote peat-bog region in the northeast of the Netherlands, and told his brother Theo the place was inexpressibly beautiful. These low turf cottages, the kind he liked to call human nests, are him teaching himself a problem he would work at for years: how to set a dark mass of building against a big pale sky. He painted it outdoors on the moor, and the wind was part of the process. Look closely and the surface is gritty. There is real sand mixed into the paint, blown onto the wet canvas while he worked.