Le Jardin du presbytère à Nuenen

Van Gogh painted this garden in the spring of 1884, while he was living in the parsonage at Nuenen with his parents, still years away from the bright colour he is famous for. It is quiet and earthy, a bare Dutch garden under a grey sky. The painting had a much louder life later on. On the 30th of March 2020, Van Gogh's birthday, a thief smashed through the glass door of a museum near Amsterdam that had just closed for the pandemic and walked out with this small canvas in the middle of the night. It stayed missing for over three years. In 2023 a Dutch art detective finally took it back, handed over wrapped in a pillowcase and carried in an Ikea bag.