Крестьянский дом среди деревьев

This is early Van Gogh, painted in September 1883, five years before the bright canvases of Arles that everyone pictures. He was working around The Hague and about to move on to the bleak moors of Drenthe, and the palette here is all wet brown and grey, the Dutch weather he grew up in. After he died the little panel stayed in the family. His mother and his sister Willemina kept it through the 1880s, and it passed quietly down the years until it reached a collection in Warsaw. Its history was murky enough that its authorship came to be doubted, and only in 2024 did experts from the Van Gogh Museum and the National Museum in Krakow confirm, beyond real dispute, that the hand was his.