Pastore con un gregge di pecore

This belongs to the years Van Gogh spent in the Dutch village of Nuenen, living in his parents' parsonage and painting the farm workers around him. He had not yet gone to Paris, had not met the Impressionists, and knew nothing of the bright colour that would later define him. The palette here is deliberately dark, all browns and dusk, the sheep dissolving into a single grey mass as a lone shepherd leads them home under a low sky. He wanted these pictures to smell of the soil. Within a year he would paint The Potato Eaters in the same village and the same muddy tones, then leave the north for good.