The Cottage

Van Gogh painted this in the spring of 1885, in Nuenen, the Dutch village where he lived with his parents and drew the local peasants all winter. He called these low, mossy cottages human nests, and wrote to his brother Theo that he felt for the nests and the people in them the way he felt for a bird's brood. This one, with its split chimney and two doors, held two families under a single sagging roof. The colours are the browns and dull greens of the heath, the same earthy range he was using at that moment for The Potato Eaters. A small figure and the darkening sky give the hut the worn look he wanted, as if it had grown out of the ground it stood on.