Landscape at Dusk

This belongs to Van Gogh's Dutch years, before Paris changed the way he painted. He made it in Nuenen in the spring of 1885, in the same months he finished The Potato Eaters, and his letters to his brother Theo mention working on a red sunset just then. The colours are deliberately dark, browns and muddy oranges, the trees standing as black shapes against the last of the light. He was still looking back at the 17th-century Dutch masters he admired, painters who built whole pictures out of shadow. He moved to Paris early the next year, and under the Impressionists his palette brightened so quickly that dark fields like this one nearly vanish from his later work.