Reminiscence of Brabant

Van Gogh usually needed the thing itself in front of him. Painting from memory was something he distrusted and rarely attempted. In the early spring of 1890, shut inside the clinic at Saint-Rémy in Provence during a relapse that cost him weeks of work, he made a small group of pictures he called reminiscences of the north, and this is one of them. The subject is Brabant, the Dutch province where he grew up and had not seen for more than four years. He described it himself in a letter of 29 April to his mother and sister: cottages with mossy roofs and beech hedges, an autumn evening, a stormy sky, the sun going down red in reddish clouds. The panel measures 29 by 36.5 centimetres. In the middle of May he left Provence for good and travelled north to Auvers, outside Paris.