Lying Cow

Van Gogh painted this cow in the late summer of 1883, in The Hague, during some of the hardest weeks of his young life. For more than a year he had been living with Sien Hoornik, a seamstress and former prostitute, together with her children, trying to hold together a household his family found scandalous and his brother Theo could barely keep funding. Within weeks of studies like this one he gave it up, left Sien, and took the train north to the bare peat moors of Drenthe to work alone. This is early Van Gogh, years before any sunflower or starry night. The color is the brown and green of wet Dutch pasture, the animal set down heavily in the grass. He was teaching himself the plain thing first, how to make a big body lie convincingly on the ground and carry its own weight.