Paesaggio con dune e figure

This comes from the very start, 1882, when Van Gogh was living in The Hague and had only just decided to become a painter. He was almost thirty and learning the trade from Anton Mauve, a cousin by marriage, who set him to work with oils and watercolour. Out on the dunes near the fishing village of Scheveningen he found what he wanted, not pretty views but plain ground and working people, bent into their labour under a heavy sky. The colours here are the browns and greys of his Dutch years, before the south changed everything. He was poor, often quarrelling with the family who supported him, and teaching himself by drawing the same figures again and again.