Il giardino della canonica di Nuenen sotto la neve

The house behind these bare trees was the parsonage at Nuenen, where Van Gogh's father was the village Protestant minister and where the painter, then in his early thirties, was living and working. He made this snowy view of the garden in the winter of 1885, one of the last winters he spent in the Netherlands. It is all browns and greys and the flat white of snow, the palette he used before Paris and the south taught him brighter colour. That spring his father died suddenly at the parsonage, and by the end of the year Van Gogh had left the country for good, first for Antwerp and then Paris. The garden here was the one just outside the family's own door.