Winter (The Vicarage Garden under Snow)

This is the garden of the parsonage at Nuenen, in the Dutch province of Brabant, where Van Gogh was living with his parents in the winter of 1885. His father was the village Protestant minister, and Vincent, then in his early thirties and mostly without work, had moved back in with them. He painted in the dark, earthy palette of these Nuenen years, the same months he was building toward the Potato Eaters. A single figure bends to clear a path across the snow, though the bare shapes around him have made more than one viewer wonder whether he is shovelling or digging. In March, only weeks after this, Van Gogh's father collapsed and died on the parsonage doorstep.