Passerelle sur un fossé

In the summer of 1883 Vincent van Gogh was living in The Hague, still teaching himself to paint and years away from any recognition. Most of his energy went into figures, peasants, diggers, the poor, and in his letters to his brother Theo he barely mentions small landscapes like this one. It is a plain, damp Dutch scene: a narrow plank bridge over a drainage ditch, under a heavy grey sky broken by one band of pale light near the horizon. There is no bright colour here, none of the yellow and blue that would come later in the south. He painted it in dark, earthy tones, the way he saw the flat country around him. Within a couple of months he had left The Hague for the peat bogs of Drenthe, further north.