Parsonage Garden at Nuenen with Pond and Figures

This is the garden of the parsonage at Nuenen, where Van Gogh's father served as the village pastor and where the painter himself was living in 1885. He painted it in November of that year, in the dark, earthy palette of his Dutch period, with figures moving beside the pond under bare trees. It was a heavy year for him. His father had died suddenly that spring, and by the end of it Van Gogh left Nuenen and Holland for good, heading toward Antwerp and then the colour he would find in Paris. The painting itself no longer exists. It was destroyed by fire in Rotterdam during the Second World War, so what survives of this quiet garden is only in old photographs and reproductions.