L'ancienne gare d'Eindhoven

Van Gogh painted this small canvas in early 1885, while he was living with his parents in the Brabant village of Nuenen. Eindhoven was the nearest town of any size, an hour's walk away, and he went there for paint supplies and to give drawing lessons to a few local amateurs. The station he shows is the old one, later replaced. He was working in the dark earth tones of these Dutch years, the palette he would abandon within months. That spring he finished The Potato Eaters, his grim picture of peasants at supper. By the end of the year he had left the Netherlands for Antwerp, and the bright colour of Paris was not far ahead.