Landscape with Pollard Willows

Van Gogh painted this in the spring of 1884 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister and where Vincent, in his early thirties, was living at home and teaching himself to paint. This is years before the bright colour of Provence. The palette is brown and grey, the sky low and heavy, and a lone labourer crosses a flat field studded with pollarded trees, their trunks cropped and knotted from repeated cutting. He called them birches in a letter, though the painting has long gone under the name willows. The bent, hard-worked trees suited him, standing in for the peasants whose lives he was trying to paint.