Marshy Landscape

This is Van Gogh long before the sunflowers and the bright south. He painted it in the summer of 1883, still in the Netherlands, still teaching himself, working in browns and dull greens close to the colour of the wet ground itself. That autumn he would leave The Hague for Drenthe, an isolated province of peat bogs and canals in the north, drawn to exactly this kind of empty, soaked land where a few dark trees and a strip of heavy sky are the whole event. He was 30, selling nothing, leaning on his brother Theo for money and for belief. Not many paintings survive from these Dutch years, and this one passed quietly into private hands rather than onto a museum wall.