Landscape at Sunset

Van Gogh painted this small canvas in April 1885 in Nuenen, the village in the south of the Netherlands where his father was the Protestant minister and where Vincent was living in the family home. His father had died suddenly a few weeks earlier, at the end of March. That same April Vincent was deep in work on The Potato Eaters, a dark interior of a peasant family eating by lamplight, and most of his time went on cottage rooms, heads and hands. This picture looks outdoors instead, at the end of a day. The sky fills most of it in oranges and yellows, the trees and low cottage roofs stand against it as dark shapes, and a road runs toward them across the flat ground. The canvas is about 27 by 41 centimetres and is in a private collection in Switzerland.