Landscape with a Church at Twilight

In the autumn of 1883 Van Gogh was alone in Drenthe, a bleak stretch of peat bog in the northern Netherlands, having just left The Hague and the woman he had been living with. He was 30 and not yet the painter most people picture, no bright colour, no thick swirls, just heavy browns and grey-greens scraped onto small panels in failing light. A church at dusk was the kind of subject he loved then, a low horizon, a spire, the day going out. He lasted only a few months in that emptiness before loneliness drove him back to his parents' house at Nuenen that December. Works from these weeks are scarce, and this one has stayed in private hands.