Femme de pêcheur sur la plage

This is very early Van Gogh, painted in 1882 in The Hague, only a couple of years after he had decided, at nearly 30, to become an artist at all. There is no sunlight and no yellow here. The whole thing is dark dress, grey sea and sand, with a red shawl as the one warm note. He was teaching himself the human figure, walking out to the nearby fishing village of Scheveningen to draw the people who worked the beach. This fisherman's wife stands alone, bonnet on, facing a cold horizon. What Van Gogh wanted more than anything then was to paint ordinary labouring people with weight and dignity, and he kept at these sombre studies for years. It would be another five years, and a move to Paris, before his palette caught fire.