Cottages

Van Gogh painted Brabant farmhouses and cottages throughout his Nuenen years (1883–1885) as part of his comprehensive social documentary of a specific rural Dutch community. He wrote to Theo in 1885 that he wanted to record 'the old nests' — the thatched, low-ceilinged, organically irregular buildings — before the new, modern, brick structures replaced them, sensing a historical disappearance in progress. These cottages were for him inseparably connected to the people who lived in them: to paint the building was to paint the life within it. The Dutch cottage subject had a long tradition — seventeenth-century genre paintings frequently placed figures in cottage doorways or beside cottage windows — and Van Gogh engaged that tradition while removing the picturesque elements and insisting on the roughness and poverty of the actual buildings he observed. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

A narrow tonal range of earthy greens, browns, and grey dominates. Paint is applied in short, blunt strokes that texture the thatched roofs convincingly. The sky is kept thin and atmospheric against the solid impasto of the buildings and foliage.