Vacas en el prado

There are no bright yellows here, none of the colour we expect from Van Gogh. He painted these cows in a wet green meadow in August 1883, in The Hague, when he was 30 and had been painting seriously for only a few years. Within weeks he would pack up and move north to the bleak moors of Drenthe, chasing peasant subjects and cheaper lodging. The picture is dark and sober, close to the muted Dutch landscape painters he admired before Paris and the south changed everything about his palette. For a long time it was known only from a single poor photograph, and doubted, until it was matched to this surviving canvas. It stays in private hands, so it is rarely seen in person.