The Vicarage at Nuenen

The Vicarage at Nuenen (1885), at the Van Gogh Museum, depicts the parsonage where Van Gogh's family lived during his father's tenure as the village's Protestant minister. The vicarage was his childhood home for the years his father served in Nuenen, and painting it carried obvious personal significance. The specific combination of the church building and its associated vicarage garden—the old chestnut tree that appears in several of his paintings, the garden wall—gave Van Gogh a subject loaded with biographical meaning that he treated with the same direct observation he brought to any other architectural subject in the village.

The vicarage's architectural forms provide a clear structural armature for the composition, with the regular geometry of the building contrasting with the organic forms of surrounding trees and garden. Van Gogh's Dutch period palette—dark greens, ochres, and the grey of plastered walls—suits the subject's sober, northern character. The paint is applied with the searching, exploratory strokes characteristic of his Nuenen landscape work.