Charrette avec bœuf rouge et blanc

Van Gogh painted this in July 1884, while he was living with his parents in the Brabant village of Nuenen and teaching himself to paint the people who worked the land around it. The ox and cart were really a way into that world. He cared about the peasants more than their animals, and here he has left the driver out altogether, so the yoked ox and the empty cart stand for the labour on their own. The dark earth tones are the ones he used all through these Dutch years, before Paris and the south changed his colour completely. He owed the subject to Anton Mauve, a successful painter and his cousin by marriage, who had given him lessons in The Hague and favoured this kind of plain rural work.