Landscape with dune

In 1882 Van Gogh was living in The Hague, trying to turn himself from a draughtsman into a painter. He had only lately taken up oils, encouraged by his cousin by marriage Anton Mauve, an established painter of the Hague School. That summer he walked out to the dunes near Scheveningen, on the North Sea coast, and worked in the open, sometimes with the wind driving sand into the wet paint. These early dune landscapes are sober and grey-brown, closer to the Dutch tradition around him than to anything that would later make his name. He was 29, newly committed to oils, working the flat coast in front of him day after day to learn the medium.