Fermes à Loosduinen près de La Haye au crépuscule

This is Van Gogh long before the sunflowers, dark and earthbound. He painted it in 1883 near The Hague, where he was living cheaply and teaching himself to handle oil paint. The subject is humble on purpose, a row of low, moss-grown thatched farm buildings at the edge of the village of Loosduinen, caught in the last grey light of the day. There is almost no colour in it, just browns and dull greens under a heavy Dutch sky. He believed at this point that a painter should stay close to peasants and the soil, and studies like this were his apprenticeship in that. Later that year he left for the empty moorlands of Drenthe to push the same rough, sombre manner further.