Ragazza in un bosco

In the summer of 1882 Van Gogh could finally buy his own oil paints, paid for by money his brother Theo sent from Paris, and this small view of a woman among tall tree trunks is one of the very first things he made with them. He was still teaching himself. He used a wooden perspective frame to get the trunks to recede correctly into the wood. He told Theo he wanted the picture to feel like a place you could walk into and breathe, and he seems to have painted it kneeling on the forest floor, because bits of oak leaf are stuck fast in the wet paint along the bottom edge. This is Van Gogh at the very start, years before the sunflowers, working out how colour and distance behave.