Paisaje con dunas

Van Gogh painted these dunes near The Hague in August 1883, and it is very early work, five years before Arles and the sunflowers. There is almost no colour in it, just the browns and greys of the coastal sand under a low grey sky, the sombre palette he still worked in then. Within weeks of finishing it his life turned over. He had been living with Sien, a seamstress he had taken in, but money and family pressure were pulling them apart, and that September he left her and The Hague for the empty peat moors of Drenthe in the north. The bleak, thinly peopled land in pictures like this is what drew him just before that move, and what he went looking for more of when he made it.