Deux femmes dans les bois

This is very early Van Gogh, a small study on paper from the late summer of 1882. He was 29 and had decided to become an artist only about two years earlier. That winter he had moved to The Hague and begun learning the craft from a relative by marriage, the established painter Anton Mauve, still working mostly in pencil and chalk and only starting to test himself in oils. The picture has stayed in private hands and has no museum home. It is a modest thing, someone teaching himself to see in colour: two women standing among the trunks of a wood, the paint thin and the light low under the trees.