La Nouvelle Église et de vieilles maisons à La Haye

By 1882 The Hague was home to a whole school of Dutch painters who prized grey weather and low, quiet tones, and Van Gogh, newly settled in the city, was soaking it up. He set himself by the Ammunition Harbor and looked across at a run of old brick houses, their facades worn white and grey, terracotta roofs crowded together. Above them rises the turret of the Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church, finished in the 1650s and by his day not new at all. The sky is that pale silver the local men loved, a little pink worked into the edge. His strokes are already deliberate and directional, the palette held down. A band of dark green in front holds the whole view in place.