Girl in the Woods

For most of two years Van Gogh had only drawn. Then, in the late summer of 1882, with money sent by his brother Theo, he bought oil paints and went out into the woods near The Hague to learn what the new medium could do. This is one of those first attempts. A girl in white stands small among the trunks of old trees, the forest floor thick with fallen leaves worked up in reddish browns and blacks. He was after the density of the place, the light coming down in patches, the feeling that you could almost smell the wet wood. The space pulls back between the trunks in the way his teacher, the painter Anton Mauve, had been showing him. The figure is nearly lost in it.