Still Life with Two Sacks and a Bottle

This dark little still life comes from a Van Gogh most people don't picture: the young Dutchman of 1884, living with his parents in the country parish of Nuenen, years before the sunflowers and the bright southern light. He painted it in the autumn, when he had gathered a few amateur pupils from the nearby town of Eindhoven and was teaching them to paint plain objects in oil. Two coarse sacks and a bottle sit in heavy brown shadow, the colours of the peasant life he admired and wanted to set down honestly. The following spring, working in the same sombre key, he would paint The Potato Eaters. Everything here is earth and gloom, still waiting for the colour he found only after he reached France.