运河边有风车的三个人物

This is Van Gogh several years before the sunflowers and the blazing yellows, a young man in the Netherlands, poor and mostly self-taught, working in the muted browns and greys of the flat Dutch countryside. He made it in 1883, the year he drifted between The Hague and the peat moors of Drenthe, drawing and painting laborers and the low horizon under heavy skies. Three small figures move along a canal past a windmill, everything held in the same damp, earthy tone. He had not yet gone south, had not yet met the Impressionists, had barely sold a thing. The painting has a strange afterlife too. It was stolen years ago and has never turned up, so today it survives mainly in reproduction.