The Old Cemetery Tower at Nuenen in the Snow

Van Gogh painted this old church tower in the winter of 1885, in the village of Nuenen where his father was the local pastor. The tower was already a ruin, a stump left from a 12th-century church, standing over a walled graveyard, and everyone knew its days were numbered. That June the parish pulled it down and sold the stones. In the months before it fell Van Gogh drew and painted it again and again, more than 30 times, watching it through snow and bare fields. Here dark wooden crosses poke above the churchyard wall under a heavy grey sky. He admired old Dutch landscape painters like Ruisdael, and you can feel that sober weather in the way he presses the clouds down onto the little tower.