Le presbytère de Nuenen au clair de lune

This is the house Van Gogh kept returning to, the parsonage at Nuenen where his father served as the village's Protestant minister. He lived here with his parents in the mid-1880s, painting weavers and peasants in dark, earthy tones, before he had ever seen the bright color of the south. He shows the manse at night under a pale moon, its windows the only warm points in a heavy blue dusk, a figure small on the path. In March 1885 his father collapsed and died at the door of this house, after years of hard quarrels between the two men. Van Gogh left Nuenen for good later that year and never painted in the Netherlands again.