Cottage with Trees

Van Gogh's 1885 depiction of a cottage with trees at Nuenen belongs to the series of Dutch vernacular architecture subjects he made alongside his figure studies. The thatched cottages of Brabant represented for him both picturesque material and documentary evidence of a disappearing traditional way of life. Bare trees surrounding a cottage — their winter skeleton contrasting with the settled solidity of the dwelling — gave him both architectural and natural forms to study simultaneously. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne holds this as part of its collection of nineteenth-century painting.

The composition balances the vertical forms of bare trees with the horizontal mass of the low cottage below. Van Gogh's dark Dutch palette renders both in consistent earthy tones, trees and building united in the same somber register. The sky provides a lighter backdrop against which the bare branches read as linear structures.