Vache couchée

This is Van Gogh long before the Van Gogh most people picture. He painted the lying cow in 1883, in The Hague, where he was around 30 and still teaching himself to paint, mostly working from laborers, weavers and the poor of the Dutch countryside. There is no yellow here, none of the heat of the south. The animal is set down in browns and greens, heavy and low to the wet ground, studied the way you study a thing to learn how it is put together. He seems to have worked it up beside a larger canvas of cows in a meadow. The blaze of Arles was still five years off. For now he was a poor young man in Holland, getting a cow right.