Landscape with Windblown Trees

In the autumn of 1885 Van Gogh ran out of people to paint. He was living in Nuenen, a village in Brabant where his father had been the Protestant minister until his death that March, and the Catholic priest had told his parishioners to stop sitting for him. A long run of peasant heads and hands came to a stop, so he went out to the fields and the roadside trees instead. Catalogues date this small canvas to November of that year.

A few weeks earlier he had gone to Amsterdam to see the Rijksmuseum, which had opened that summer in its new building, and came back full of Frans Hals and how quickly the paint had been put on. On 24 November he left Nuenen for Antwerp and never painted in Brabant again. The work is in private hands, and catalogues list it under two names, one calling the trees windblown and the Dutch one simply calling them crooked.