Casetta e donna con capra

Van Gogh painted this in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister, in the summer of 1885. He had finished The Potato Eaters that spring and was still working almost entirely in browns and greys. Cottages like this one held him. In his letters he called them human nests, and he went on painting them until he left for Antwerp that November. The canvas reached a public collection unusually early. In 1908 the Stadel's museum association bought it in Paris, 18 years after his death and before most museums in Europe had committed to him. A critic writing in 1923 said the picture already had lion's claws in it.