Poplars near Nuenen

Poplars near Nuenen (1885), at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, depicts the avenue of poplar trees near the village where Van Gogh lived with his family during his Dutch period. The poplar tree had strong associative resonance in Dutch landscape painting going back to the Golden Age, and Van Gogh's engagement with this subject connected him to a national tradition he both respected and sought to renew. He painted the poplars at different seasons and times of day, treating them as a landscape laboratory for exploring the effects of light on a familiar subject. The bare winter poplars with their vertical silhouettes against the sky were among his most austere and architecturally compelling landscape subjects.

The strong vertical lines of the poplar trunks create a grid-like structure across the pictorial field that organises the composition with architectural firmness. Van Gogh's brushwork in this period uses relatively distinct, directional marks to build the rough texture of bark and the complex silhouette of bare branches. The grey Dutch sky is painted with broad, horizontal strokes that contrast with the trees' vertical energy.