雪中拾柴者

This is Vincent van Gogh four years before the sunflowers and the bright south, before the painter most people picture. In 1884 he was living with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen, still teaching himself, and what he wanted was to paint peasant labor in the manner of Jean-François Millet, a French artist he revered. So the palette here is all browns, greys, and snow, and the figures bend under their bundles of wood on a cold, flat Brabant afternoon. He made it in the autumn of that year, as the weather turned. Van Gogh was then convinced that honest painting of the poor should be built from exactly these dark, earthbound tones.