The Old Tower in the Fields

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1884, in the village of Nuenen where his father was the Protestant pastor. The tower is what was left of a medieval church, standing alone in the fields with a small graveyard of dark wooden crosses at its foot. Within a year it would be gone. The village sold the ruin and had it pulled down in 1885, and Van Gogh, who drew and painted it around 35 times, minded the loss. To him the tower and its graves said something plain about the peasants he lived among: for centuries they had been buried in the same fields they worked. A cloaked figure moves across the ground toward it under a pale, nearly full moon.