The Old Tower at Nuenen

By the time Van Gogh painted this in 1884, the old church tower at Nuenen was already condemned. The 12th-century structure had fallen into such disrepair that the parish had it torn down in the summer of 1885, and in the seventeen months before it came down Van Gogh drew and painted it around 35 times. Here the spire is still in place, standing over a walled churchyard where you can make out dark wooden crosses above the wall. He set it under a heavy, clouded sky, close to the older Dutch landscape tradition he admired, the world of Ruisdael and of painters like Constable and Daubigny. The fields around it are worked and bare. Within a year the tower itself would be gone, its stones sold off, and only the little cemetery left standing in the open land.