Water Mill at Kollen near Nuenen

This is Van Gogh years before the sunflowers, painting in the dark Dutch manner he started with. In the spring of 1884 he was living at Nuenen, a village in the south of the Netherlands, and in late May he set up in front of a working watermill on a small river, with its two red roofs and the poplars around it. He wrote to his friend, the painter Anthon van Rappard, that he had asked about the spot in a little inn by the station and had finally got to paint it. The palette is all browns and greens, earth and water, nothing of the colour to come. The mill itself still stands near Eindhoven today.